Amos Wilson - Developmental Psychology of the Black Child, Part 1 | For the People (1981)

good evening some time ago we did a two-part series on the black child and discussed among other topics psychomotor development and the effects of racism on the black child this evening we return to the subject in the interest of thoroughness with Mr Amos Wilson author of The developmental psychology of the black child Mr Wilson first this question why a quote psychology of the black child end quote because in a sentence we can say that psychologist that are currently available for dealing with black children do not really meet the needs of black children nor black people

as a whole psychology like many other discipl uh it's based upon the history and experience of a people the psychology that's available to black people that is used for teaching black people for uh a whole host of things that we use psychology for in this culture is really European psychology and is based upon the European uh experience and to try to transfer that psychology to black people to try to explain the black psyche in terms of a psych ology that's not related to the history and experience of black people is really to misuse that psychology

and to mislead black people but aren't we all one people aren't we we are to a degree but I often use a paradox when this kind of question is asked I say that we are different because we are so much alike all of us are alike in that we use learning as a means of coping with our environment and uh in that sense black people learn as white people learn such so we are the same in that we use the instrument of learning as a coping tool however what we learn is what makes our behaviors

different so then we can say in the long run in terms of uh the historical experience of black people what have black people learned and looking at that learning experience we must say then that their behaviors related to that experience and the thing we recognize immediately is that the black learning experience is not the European learning experience what do you mean there and uh I sort of like to look at it in terms of first in terms of individual psychology for instance if you did a psychological profile of me uh that profile would have to

look into my own personal experience my own personal history you could not use that profile for yourself it would not fit you I could could not explain your behavior in terms of my experience as such because your behavior and your experience of course is unique the uh therefore the European experience is a unique experience the psychology of Europeans is based on that experience and consequently it cannot be used for our people we have to look in the history of African people for the psychology of uh African people you say so then the psychology is for

instance take educational psychology to a great extent that psychology is built around the white middle class child but uh if you take that psychology and go into the majority of schools in our urban areas you not you don't find the right middle class child there so you have a teacher who perhaps has been educated in terms of that psychology running into children or having to deal with a classroom of children and the child she's been taught to deal with is not even in the classroom to begin with so of course this creates a great disparity

in what she's learned what she has or he expects to go on in the classroom what actually occurs which leads to a good deal of confusion the other aspect of why we need a black psychology involves the fact that eurocentric psychology is a part of the eurocentric and European oppressive mechanism it is one of the major means by which the European has you has uh maintained his domination and subjugation of black people it is a psychology that has developed to a great extent out of the European Colonial experience and still carries those roots and a

as a matter of fact even in this day and age European psychology is used to manipulate black people to maintain them in a position of subjugation and so forth so we have to develop a psychology a black psychology that must countermand and counteract this kind of influence of your Centric Psych how is European psychology um used to manipulate and dominate uh black people there are any number of ways uh that it's used first of all it's used to maintain an image of black people both in Europeans themselves and of black people themselves the so-called famous

inferiority complex to a great extent uh eurocentric psychology has been used to justify basic white prejudices so the uh average white person in America in the racist American society thinks of blacks let's say as so-called innately inferior say intellectually along comes then their psychology with the so-called Sheen of being scientific to justify what is already a common myth So to that extent it supports a uh a racist system that exists in the society as a matter of fact not only does it do that it provid provides uh various number of categories and labels that are

used by the Layman as well as by professionals to uh prevent black children in many ways from Gaining positive uh what are these labels many of the labels uh labels such as learning disabled those labels that we hear a lot about nowadays hyperactivity uh reading disabilities language deficiencies as a matter of fact to a great extent when you are in a university or College and you go in a course that supposedly deals with the minority child so-called it's really becomes to a great extent a course on labels you'll say disadvantaged children this kind of thing

culturally deprived children so what happens quite often the teacher leaves that kind of course with a series of negative labels so that when that teacher perhaps enters into a classroom these labels are placed on the children which lowers her expectation or his expectation about these children and provides a ready excuse for not teaching you see it uh in a sense this labeling business has left the teacher free now to excuse himself or herself from really teaching because you can immediately make an excuse well this child is not learning because it's from a disadvantaged neighborhood or

it's from a deprived culture or it uh may have a minimal brain damage or it's hyperactive uh and therefore why bother I want to go back into your to your to your book a little bit we'll leave that and go to some other things but in your book you mentioned that many people make the mistake of looking at the black child as a as as as a white child that's painted black would would you expound on that son please yes that's a a common mistake that we find and in fact it's it's sort of a

myth that's used to justify a lot of so-called civil rights movements and integrationist movements and uh it's been sort of a convenient fiction however sometimes it works against our own interest and that is of seeing the black child merely as a colored child you know it's just a white child except the fact it has a little different color as such and underneath the color everything else is the same but uh I object to that because color is not merely just uh a shade on the on the body what your color is represents the history and

experience of your people we are the color we are because of the long evolutionary experience of black people in Africa as a result of black people adjusting to the African continent it uh relates also to the concept the of genes you see what our color of course comes from our genes but we cannot think of genes merely as little chemical packets that uh color your skin and color your hair and give your body shape and forms the genes are in a way a miniature abstraction of the history and experience of one's people the cultural experience

as well as the biological experience of one people so then what color represents on the surface is really the history and experience of black people you see so whatever biological decisions our people made biological adjustments they made to the African continent and so forth is represented in our bodies okay um in our first series you talked about psycho motor development and the black child would you Briefly summarize this area this again goes back to to uh what I talk about as the the African experience the African evolutionary experience sometimes we Overlook some very basic ideas

and one of the basic ideas revolves around the question the when you look at the European climate and the European vegetation and its climatic history and then you compare that say to the African climate history uh the the African geography and vegetational uh systems and so forth you are faced with the issue then what why is it that the black body should be a duplicate of the European Body when if we look at it from a biological point of view the nature seeks to adjust a body to its geographical surrounds and the geographical surrounds of

of a the black man in Africa is quite significantly different from that of the European so in light of that we should expect that that body the African body should not be a duplicate of the European Body as such so consequently in order to understand the African body we must then look at the African evolutionary uh experience as such when you look at it that way then you begin to recognize that there are very significant differences in the rat of development of black say and uh European children for instance many of the charts we use

in this country and other countries are charts based upon the developmental rates and orientation of Europeans when we look at the African charts though we see rates that are so significantly different until for instance after the after a study of black American children by the American Academy of Pediatrics it was found that their differences were such that is the differences between the development of black children and white children that a a different nutritional chart and a different nutritional approach to black children should be used for instance the black child does things on the very first

day of birth such as the ability to hold its head up if you would pull it up into a sitting position it is able to actually hold its head up black children able to do this basically say nine hours after being born or within with on the very first day the European child reaches this Milestone a month and a half later black children for for instance uh confirmed ly move their heads about and deal with the environment or maintain a social relationship with uh their caraker or with an examiner uh on the first two days

after birth the European child takes about two months to reach uh this point you uh there are things black children are doing at say seven weeks that the European child reaches some 20 weeks later uh it even gets broader than that for instance if a black child at 5 months can coordinate himself so that he can say take a form out of a form board it will uh take the European child some six months to get to that kind of get to that same Milestone or walking say walking the stairs alone a black child is

doing that uh many of them at seven months uh the European child then is going to take another three or four months sometimes to get to that same point as a matter of fact some of the developmental scales that are used to measure children's rates of uh growth uh include some 60 different items and on all 60 of those items the black child comes out significantly ahead in psycho motor development and remember I'm emphasizing psycho motor development here not just motor development we're also speaking in terms of those things that are mental as well so

then it would indicate then both on a physical level as far as the rates of body growth and so forth as well as on a psychological level the black child is significantly in advance of his European counterpart for uh to add on another aspect of this because sometimes the European psychologist concedes this growth and development of the black child and it's put under the caption of motoric uh advancement a motoric superiority of the black child is if it has nothing a little good athlete yeah right it has nothing to do with the mind but you

know now we are developing a different type of so-called intelligence test uh that doesn't deal with pencil and paper and it's far less so-call uh culturally oriented we uh are now developing tests with the computers wherein we can actually attach electrodes to the brain and challenge that child's say V Vision uh Hearing in response to things going on in the environment and get a read out of its brain wave activities as to how it is processing that information how it is responding to uh those stimuli that are occurring in the environment and here we find

and it's interesting at this point to to note that Jensen himself notes this in his famous uh Tris that uh degraded black people to a good extent that the brain wave patterns of black children shows a significant advance in terms of maturity over that of white children which means then that even at Birth not only are they motorically in advance but in terms of their ability to process information and handle information they're also in advance and this is seen too in the earlier accomplishment of in the language area black children of course are talking earlier

as well as walking earlier as well as establish in U what we call social relations earlier and so forth so you see when we this somehow must be related to the African experience of people and you can see the tremendous damage that can be done if you use for instance the white middle class child as a model for measuring black children or use what is adequate to meet their nutritional needs as being adequate to meet the needs of black children children and this is why that myth of the black child being a white child colored

black becomes ultimately damaging to black children because you're faced with the issue then in a sense in terms of the advancement of black children using a standard uh of the European child is it may not it be possible that we may be retarding the growth and development of that child when we talk about the Readiness of a child to learn and you look at the European child may we not be missing out on the Readiness of our own children because we're not looking at those children in terms of their actual ancestry and background so there

are many implications and I guess all this ties back into the need for psychology definitely the black child definitely they need and based on that black experience because it becomes obvious in terms of its physiological and psychological growth and development you are not talking about the same children at all I went to a college uh MH couple of days ago uh and it just so happened that I'm serious about this um when I approach the desk um there was a developmental psychology book on that desk and I looked through that book and there was nothing

on the black child and I'm talking about it a a black institution uh why why why is that why does that exist for a number of reasons one of the reasons I think and an overall reason is that these psychologist you see just by the title of them are called developmental psychology and that deceives many people into thinking then that this is a psychology that has equal applicability across board and unfortunately many black schools and black Scholars operate under this illusion one of the things that we don't as black people I think we are not

conscious enough of is how white disciplines not only psychology but sociology all are uh part and parcel really a part of the process of maintaining the subjugation of black people and I don't think we are aware to the degree that we should be that when we're engaged in standard American Education we are actually engaged in what are called European studies or white studies we have lot of people who went off you know in the 60s and we demanded black studies as if we were demanding something ethnic as if what had been offered in America and

what's being offered in American universities is non-ethnic and objective and across the board and therefore uh the European then doesn't call his courses uh the psychology of the white child or the sociology from the European perspective or or white economics but this is exactly what it is and therefore you have many in many black schools then this idea that simply because it is not overtly uh label white or european H that it is not therefore white or european in Ary and to a great extent uh the these psychologies are exactly what they should be in

a sense they are there to maintain the the position of Europeans as such uh the European and the protects his own interest by not really talking about the black child in any truthful light and presenting the black child in a different sort of light the ultimate outcome of studies even in Black schools ultimately is to maintain the European in a in a uh Superior position as such what do you think um would be gain if the black population worldwide um were to become more knowledgeable about the black child's um psycho motor development Etc um what

would you think the the the um the benefit would be I think the benefit would be and that would be not just a benefit but the many benefits would be uh first of all turning over the world situation as it is today I think it's basic basically an insult to the intelligence and to the man and Womanhood of black people and I may say of nonwhite people that we have a minority in the world that is dominating that world we have to forget that the European is really a minority in the world it's not a

majority we're so used to in this country of thinking of ourselves as minorities and we of to forget that we are part of a very large majority in the world in fact I heard wouldn't project that the European segment of the world population would be something like 10% in the uh 1990s at this point I think it's around 20% now which means that we have then from 10 to 20% of the world population literally ruling over and dominating the other 80% the other thing what's wrong with that the other thing yes what's wrong with that

uh there are many things wrong with it a part of the thing is of course is the fact that we as nonwhite people Supply these countries with the wealth that are under our lands and the amazing Paradox is in a sense that the Richer our lands are our African lands if you mentioned even the Asian on the South American ones the poorer quite often the people are who are above them and then we have this image then of nonwhite people as being poor as poverty strict and you have the shame of people L literally starving

to death while their soils Supply the riches and wealth that maintains essentially a resourceless Europe so just the idea of enjoying more of our own wealth and the wealth of our land is uh is enough to develop a psychology not only a psychology but really A a whole host of disciplines a sociology and economics that will reverse this kind of situation where a the majority of the world's people that also own the actual majority of the world's natural wealth should benefit from that wealth as such the other thing is of course that we have assumed

unfortunately that somehow what is European represents normality represents the way that the world should go it represents the only way of what we call development and unfortunately I don't think we've examined European psychology uh paradoxically European psychology is not contained in psychology books it's essentially contained in history and what do we see say that again um the psychology of Europeans are essentially contained in history not in psychology books because it's a psychology that you see active out on the world stage and what is the result of that psychology what is the result of the say

dominant position of the European in the world it is bought at a tremendous cost to nonwhite people for instance you can ask the question uh is there any country where the Europeans stepped that the local people were not degraded in some sort of way that the local people were not exploited in some sort of way that in many instances such as this country or in South America where the local populations were not literally and physically destroyed as such when we look at even so in in the historical sense you see we are dealing here with

a people in terms of their actions to me that are are not commendable in terms of what we should be seeking as a people I look into the future and I see then nonwhite people coming back on the world stage and ruling that world stage taking that rightful place in the power relations of the world will those nonh white people be colored Europeans will then they set up a world too that depends upon the degradation of other people and upon the subjugation of other people will they too establish a racist ideology or will there World

be a different one based on a whole different set of principles do you think it will be it depends upon what choices we make as people it depends again upon looking at their psychology understanding the results of their psychology critically analyzing the European psyche then looking at at our own and making some very critical choices if for instance though we choose as unfortunately has been chosen by many of our people equality as our goal this kind of thing that we want to be the same as the European we don't want to be any different as

matter of fact we want to be so so much alike we don't even want people to notice our color you see we want to remove the color line and forget that we are black or forget that we are Asian or what have you now then I think about that and said well what is this world really like if we are on the brink now of world suicide we're on a situation as I just mentioned where a small percentage of the world lives fat and and well off of a large majority of the world that lives

in degradation and so forth are we saying that when we want to be the same as the European are we saying in a sense then what we want to do is just multiply what the European already has we want to share in and I think this is a crucial issue for say the Black American when he makes that kind of statement does it mean then we want to join IBM or the other companies so that we can equally exploit Africans and equally exploit third world Nations uh I don't think when we look at it that

that we would choose sameness or being just like them and we I don't think once we look at the effects of the European ideologist and psychologist on nonwhite people that we will choose those as being adequate for our future goal in fact I think the choice of equality with whites is a very lowlevel goal for black people I think it because of course when we look at this world to today we're almost on the brink now of where the white man is ready to destroy the whole of the Earth where he seems to be unable

to restrain himself okay we have to come back next week for part two Mr Amos Wilson thank you very much that's our program please join us next week good evening e for