#joseph white

Credit:George McCalman

Hysteria. The vapors. Penis envy. Homosexuality as a disease. Dementia praecox.

There’s no shortage of outmoded or discredited theories in the field of psychology. For the late Joseph White, professor of psychology and comparative culture at UC Irvine and “godfather of black psychology,” the most pressing issue in the field in the late ‘60s and 70s was the representation of African Americans — or lack thereof.

“It is vitally important that we develop, out of the authentic experience of black people in this country, an accurate workable theory of black psychology,” wrote White in his groundbreaking Ebony piece “Toward a Black Psychology.”

His argument was not simply that notions of black inferiority — a predisposition to a lower IQ, for example — were wrong, but that the way psychology evaluated mental health and development, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, was based on biased frameworks that perceived only deficiency, not difference, and invalidated the lived experience of its subjects.

Joseph L. White speaks to students at UC Irvine in 2013.

White critiques, for example, the white researcher who enters a home looking for a copy of the New York Review of Books as evidence of of an intellectually stimulating environment when a black preschooler is nearby reciting several songs from memory. He also takes researchers to task for their reduction of black family life to a series of deficiencies — family unit with a missing father — when a highly engaged extended family often plays a substantive role in the development of a child. And he writes that certain attitudes cherished by white culture do not hold the same significance in black culture because their outcomes are not the same — a dynamic we see in today’s racially divergent perceptions of law enforcement.

A strike against cultural deprivation theory, White argued for a strength, not deficit, based psychology.

Joseph L. White, UCI professor emeritus of social sciences, is known as the “father of black psychology.“ Steve Zylius / UC Irvine.

White’s piece cemented his status as a pioneer, a role to which he was no stranger. White was only one of five black Ph.D.s in psychology when he earned his doctorate in 1961. He became one of the founders of the Association of Black Psychologists in 1968 and produced “Toward a Black Psychology” in 1970, while at UC Irvine.

In addition to paving the way for a multicultural psychology, White was also committed to mentorship, establishing the Educational Opportunity Program, which has provided access for more than 250,000 disadvantaged students in California, many of them the first in their family to college. He personally mentored more than 100 students who went on to become psychologists from diverse backgrounds — African American, Asian American, Latino, Native American and women.

White passed away in late 2017, but leaves behind a legacy from a remarkable life — he was a campaign director for Robert F. Kennedy (!) — and a field, psychology, far more sensitive and inclusive than when he found it.