484 Ethnic Minorities
view that segregation had possibly robbed the Black person
of “some vital aspect of his personality” leaving him
deficient for adapting effectively. The prevailing picture
presented was one of human beings who were able only to
react to their environments rather than take charge of their
destinies.
Now, there is no question that African Americans as a
group have been continuously and disproportionately num-
bered among the poor, and that they suffer and have suffered
personally and collectively in the United States. Indeed, at
times it does appear that African Americans have responded
as if “shaped” by the “contingencies” imposed upon them by
the racist society (Hayes, 1991). In many instances, this has
led to features in the African American personality which
could be called “adaptive inferiority” (Pugh, 1972). But we
know, too, from a closer reading of history and from personal
observation that this has not been all there is to the psycho-
logical story of African Americans. It has taken something
more to gain the level of personal growth that many African
Americans have reached against the kinds of odds they have
faced. Ironically, it seems that the scholars that have been best
able to capture these facts have tended to be those in the hu-
manities. Thus, the African American novelist and essayist,
Ralph Ellison, commented that he set himself the goal as a
writer to “commemorate in fiction... that which I believe to
be enduring and abiding in our situation, especially those
human qualities which the American Negro has developed
despite and in rejection of the obstacles and meannesses
imposed upon us” (1964, p. 39; italics added). Furthermore
one of the brightest literary lights of the Harlem Renaissance
of the 1920s, Langston Hughes, proclaimed that this aspira-
tion was not just a characteristic of the literate and well-to-do.
In much of his work, he highlighted what he saw as the
attitude of triumphing over adversity that was part and parcel
of the African American’s everyday life. In one of his most
famous poems, he portrays a mother urging her son not to turn
back in his struggle for accomplishment, reminding him that
“I’se been a-climbin’ on... and turnin’ corners” in spite of
the fact that “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” (1959,
p. 187).
In the face of the inability of social science to develop a
balanced understanding of African Americans, the mood of
the 1960s provided a new impetus for African American
psychologists to express their longstanding discontent with
American social science (Guthrie, 1998). Some in the new
generation of African American scholars chose to reject
Western perspectives altogether and move in new conceptual
directions. The development of the Afrocentric perspective in
psychology is a prime example, and a considerable body of
literature has come from this point of view (for example,
Akbar, 1991; L. J. Myers, 1988; Nobles, 1991; J. L. White &
Parham, 1990). For others of us, the difficulty with the char-
acterization of African Americans was not simply a concern
about racist trends in American social science. The problem
was also that the reigning model in American psychology in
general was a “mechanistic” one, a framework that portrayed
the individual as a passive being whose responses are primar-
ily determined either by environmental factors or by internal
physiological and constitutional states.
The behaviorist position had been most clearly identified
with the mechanistic tradition. However, even classical
psychoanalytic theory showed clear evidence of such a
direction, reflected in Freud’s early efforts to develop a
“metapsychology” that would describe the basic forces dri-
ving human functioning (Holt, 1972). Freud’s thinking about
his clinical observations led him to theorize in ways that ac-
tually were opposite to the prevailing scientific viewpoints of
the day (Cameron & Rychlak, 1985; Holt, 1972). Still, in the
first half of the twentieth century, especially, the mechanistic
perspectives in Freudian thought were a considerable influ-
ence on conceptualizations of the human being. The problem
for African Americans in this context has been that when
human beings in general are not seen as taking an active, cop-
ing stance in life, then the tendency not to see active and
creative features in the behavior of African Americans fol-
lows naturally. Thus, some of us felt that what was needed
was a broader philosophical and conceptual framework
within psychology as a whole.
Fortunately, during this time such a perspective was
beginning to develop. It was being expressed in independent
quarters and in varied language by experimentalists (Sarbin,
1977) and clinicians (Rychlak, 1968). Leona Tyler encapsu-
lated the spirit of the times in the opening pages of her book
on individuality (1978) by noting that “In psychology fresh
winds are blowing, sweeping away overly restrictive as-
sumptions, dusting off concepts that had been covered over
and neglected, picking up and juxtaposing separate ideas to
produce novel combinations.... Pluralism is the order of the
day” (p. 1). Counterposed against this notion of humankind
portrayed in the passive, mechanistic voice was a trend of
psychological scholarship that described the “humanistic”
view, one portraying the human individual as “an active,
responsible agent, not simply a helpless, powerless reagent,”
(Chein, 1972 p. 6). The human being in this active image is
one “who actively does something with regard to some of the
things that happen to him or her... [and who] seeks to shape
[the] environment rather than passively permit [himself or
herself] to be shaped by the latter, a being, in short, who in-
sists on injecting [himself or herself] into the causal process
of the [surrounding] world” (p. 6).