Centering Human Liberation in Social Science Research
Notes from Na'im Akbar
“The principle, which must guide African American research, must be an objective of self-knowledge and collective liberation.”
Na’im Akbar, Paradigms of African American Research
The radicalism of the 1960s and 70s was not confined to the streets. Within the ivory tower of academia, a new generation of scholars was challenging the basic assumptions of their respective fields. One school of thought that emerged during this time is now known as the Africentric (or more commonly, Afrocentric) school. Building on the legacy of thinkers like Edward Wilmot Blyden and Marcus Garvey, it centers the people of the African continent (and their descendants in the West) in understanding humanity, material reality, and the unknown.
Dr. Na’im Akbar, former president of the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi), is a foundational theorist of the Africentric school. His interventions in studying mental health, education, and issues of Black manhood have inspired generations of Black psychologists. Dr. Akbar also had much to say about the research methods used in the social sciences. We will explore two of his essays on that topic: his 1989 paper “Paradigms of African American Research”1 and 1984’s “Africentric Social Sciences for Human Liberation.” Both deal with critiquing the Western paradigm of social science research and how to build a viable alternative.
‘Even the Rat Was White’: Deconstructing Western Social Science
Middle class. Male. Caucasian. These are the characteristics of the “normative” social science research subject in the West (North America and Western Europe, primarily). From psychology to anthropology to economics, social scientists study these individuals to gain their insight. All others (non-white, non-male, poor) are deemed “deficient” and “pathological” by contrast. This dynamic is maintained by treating the social sciences as “objective” and value-free. Dr. Akbar begins both essays by drawing attention to the implicit acceptance of the assumptions in the Western research paradigm. But what is a paradigm? In “Paradigms of African American Research,” Dr. Akbar defines it as:
“…the shared conception of what is possible, the boundaries of acceptable inquiry, and the limiting cases. Within science a paradigm allows certain stability in models, methods, and modalities of knowledge, but at the price of certain insensitivity to new input.”
For the professor, a paradigm is the highest, most abstract layer of the ideological structure. It blankets everything below it, only allowing certain “foreign” elements through. For white social scientists, the Western paradigm reproduces their dominance in intellectual spaces. Even worse, too many Black social scientists have adopted the Western paradigm wholesale.
The consequence of this, as Dr. Akbar explains in “Africentric Social Sciences for Human Liberation,” is conceptual incarceration (a term borrowed from fellow Afrocentric psychologist Dr. Wade Nobles). Researchers who are conceptually incarcerated do not produce findings that lean into the strengths of Black people, only the weaknesses. As Dr. Akbar explains:
“It has led to a preoccupation with deviance, deficiency, and an excessive involvement with ‘victim analysis.’ Native African scholars have often taken on the position of the neocolonialist scholar advocating the ‘improvement’ of his or her people by the adoption of European personal traits and social patterns…”
The research of the conceptually incarcerated is detached from Black social and political struggle, as the researcher tries to remain objective in their views. Objectivity is fundamental, a way to not impose values onto their findings. But, as Dr. Akbar states, “objectivity is a value.” Choosing objectivity restricts the types of questions asked. From the start, certain modes of inquiry have been delegitimized and thus eliminated.
One level below the paradigm is the research model. The model, according to Dr. Akbar, “determines the answers of your research in that it predetermines what will be seen when the investigation begins.” For Eurocentric (Dr. Akbar also defines them as Euro-American) researchers, that model is normality. The middle-class Caucasian male is the normal subject. Psychology, being Dr. Akbar’s discipline, is prominent in his examples. The discipline is replete with this notion of non-Western people as primitive—Dr. Akbar cites the most acclaimed psychologists, including Carl Jung, B.F. Skinner and G. Stanley Hall, who all perpetuated this view. However, it is not limited to psychology. As the professor writes,
“Sociology has identified the ‘middle class’ as the normative group. Anthropology has identified all non-Western peoples variously as savage, primitive, or uncivilized. The volumes of psychological literature over the last 100 years has been based on observations primarily on Europeans, exclusively Caucasian, predominantly male, and as Robert Guthrie ( 1976) has noted, ‘even the rat was white.’”
Another characteristic of the Eurocentric model is individualism. For these scholars, people are best understood as distinct, independent beings. Interdependence of any kind (including with nature) has even been diagnosed as a symptom of mental health maladies like schizophrenia. Likewise, the concept of internal fate control2 is normal and desirable. Black people’s strong spiritual tradition and belief in a Higher Power become further signs of savagery.
Competition forms the next assumption of the Eurocentric research model. Success in society, be it political, social, or economic, is derived from the struggle between individuals. Victory belongs to those with the most competitive personality. Of course, the negative aspects of competition (e.g., manipulation of others, lack of respect for rules, disdain for collective morality) are minimized or neglected entirely.
The world is rational. Tangible. Quantifiable. This is the last dimension of the Eurocentric model, according to Dr. Akbar. To be normal is to be a materialist—not in the modern sense of obsession with money and status, but a belief that it is only the observable that matters. Natural, not supernatural.
And so, the model is set. The “normal” human is a competitive, materialist, rugged individualist middle-class white man. The doctor continues,
“‘Non-whiteness,’ communalism, cooperation, femininity would all be in some way viewed as deviant or at best, non-normative.”
Methodologies sprout from the model. Black people are already assumed to be inferior due to the paradigm and models used. The method of inquiry is then a ‘deficit’ method. Dr. Akbar offers common descriptions of Black research subjects: “culturally deprived,” “socially handicapped,” “disadvantaged.” Regarding how research subjects are chosen in a given study, Dr. Akbar has this to say,
“Those African Americans identified for sampling are those who typify the expectation of deviance from the model. Disproportionate numbers of studies on African-Americans look at prison inmates, delinquents, academic non-achievers, poor, welfare recipients, single parents, etc…As the white, male college sophomore has been the model used for volumes of psychological research, the marginalized, poverty stricken, educationally deprived, socially destitute African-American male or female has been the comparable population among ‘non-whites’ that has served as the typical case example to study the behaviors of ‘non-white’ subjects.”
The gap between Black and white people in society, reinforced by the paradigm, entrenched in the models, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy through the methodology. The famous Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test is a case in point. It allowed researchers to enumerate (and subsequently compare) the mental capacities of people—the perfect tool for the Eurocentric model. The issue is that the IQ test contains the social, political, and cultural assumptions of the society that created it. In this case, the West. For those oppressed within those societies, the IQ might measure something completely different. Dr. Akbar states,
“Perhaps, the lower the IQ score may mean the greater autonomy of this African-American subject and the degree of their resistance to the imposition of white values.”
This possibility is inconceivable within the Eurocentric model. For them, lower IQ scores automatically equal lower intelligence. And given the sampling methods used, the groups studied are typically not comparable anyway. The same results are demonstrated in tests conducted in the other social sciences. The test results, in turn, inform how research is implemented, known as the modality.
Researchers become consultants to government officials and corporations—science in service to power. Cutting government safety net programs and increasing police budgets become “evidence-based” solutions. The social order, born of white supremacist violence and patriarchal terror, remains. But scientific research is a tool. While it has sustained the current world, it can also help build a new one. For that, a new paradigm is needed.
Pillars of a New Research Paradigm
The first step is to recognize that the new paradigm is not simply the opposite of the Eurocentric one. This is a reactive position. It would leave the new paradigm dependent, unable to pursue novel inquiries. The Africentric model is, ironically enough, independent. As Dr. Akbar states,
“We do not argue that a model for human liberation should substitute the norm of a Black male of African descent for a Caucasian male of European descent. Such a concretization would merely substitute one limited model for another limited model. ‘Africentric’ is utilized from the perspective that Africa constitutes the primordial context for human growth and liberation. African-Americans represent the most extreme examples of victims of human oppression and would be the most appropriate group on which to demonstrate a liberation psychology.”
One may quarrel with who is or isn’t the “most extreme examples of victims of human oppression.” Nevertheless, the Black experience, with its deep connection to the origins of humanity on the African continent, and its fight for survival in the modern, Western world, offers key wisdom for generating a liberation-focused social science. Research studies on Black people will view Black people’s behavior and social relations as normative for Black people. Not a deviation from another group, nor a standard for all other groups to live by. The only universal norm (if such a thing exists) is nature. The professor explains further,
“Both the content and instruments for Black research should emerge from the fertile cultural ground of the African and African American (African West Indian or other appropriate groups' experiences)…Rather than study ways of teaching Black mothers, middle class non-black techniques of child-rearing, researchers might look at successful Black children and determine by what techniques were they raised and acquired the impressive adaptive skills that have permitted them to succeed in often overwhelmingly oppressive environments.”
The Africentric model is holistic. It synthesizes body and mind. Material and spiritual. Intelligence in one domain means intelligence in the other. These assumptions foreclose the level of precision required from Eurocentric social science models. What is lost in exactness, however, is gained in the “holistic, multidimensional polydeterminism of being human.” A macroscopic view, if you will.
The Africentric model emphasizes survival. The tendency toward self-preservation is observed throughout the natural world. It would make sense, then, that the human push for survival is a core component of a social science model. Competition may result, but cooperative relations could also form. Even parasitism is an important survival technique. Collective survival is what’s normal, not just competition. Dr. Akbar gives the example of the family unit. Given that survival is the goal, the normal family unit is neither nuclear (Eurocentric) nor extended (reactive opposite)—it is flexible. Elastic. It conforms to the needs of the collective.
The importance of the collective is sacrosanct. Humans cannot be understood in isolation. We are unique, sure, but not siloed beings. This is the African philosophy of Ubuntu3: “I am because we are, and because we are, therefore I am,” a (rough) translation of the isiZulu phrase, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Infusing a social scientific model with Ubuntu leads to different questions. Questions of similarity, not difference. What human values and characteristics are shared by all, and how does our uniqueness paradoxically reinforce our shared values?
These similarities stem from our shared essence, which is spiritual. Again, the Africentric model’s holistic approach does not eliminate material reality. But to understand a person, one must inquire about the mental, the physical, and the metaphysical. Dr. Akbar defines it as such:
“The concept of humanity’s essential spirituality merely suggests that when men and women are reduced to their lowest terms they are invisible and of a universal substance.”
The universal substance incorporates nature as well. Humans are not at odds with the natural world, or at least we shouldn’t be. As defined by African spirituality, the human-nature relationship is built on harmony and order, not conflict. African “traditional healers,” as Dr. Akbar calls them, exemplify this balance. These healers were “simultaneously herbalists (users of objective power) and griots (reciters of ‘self’ or conjurers of subjective power).” Their griot work captured the spiritual, while the herbalism dealt with the material.
Further balance is provided between the rational and the affective, or emotional. One’s emotions are a legitimate lens to view the self. Instead of categorizing emotions as simply irrational (pathological, and thus abnormal) behavior, Dr. Akbar situates them as arational. Not rational, but still useful and insightful.
With these traits (holistic, survival-oriented, spiritual, collectivist), the Africentric paradigm and model produce methodologies beneficial to a liberation project. Dr. Akbar lists four:
Theoretical - a systematic approach to question creation and selection stemming from self-reflection and introspection of the group experience
Falsification - demonstrating how a model’s assumptions and subsequent conclusions are incorrect, both theoretically and empirically
Ethnographic - an empirical, observational approach that catalogues the strengths and “self-affirmative patterns” of a social group, not just deficits
Heuristic - building on the ethnographic method, it constructs (or reconstructs) the theory that has led to the survival of a social group (e.g., Black people)
Coming back to the example of IQ, an Africentric intelligence test would measure different phenomena, including:
“…(1) knowledge of the collective reality of self, (2) knowledge of environmental obstacles to effective (collective) self-development, (3) actions initiated to remove or master such obstacles, and ultimately (4) knowledge of the Divine and universal laws that guide human development into knowledge of the Creator.”
And how would the results of these Africentric studies be used? What are its modalities? One is institution building. The process of liberation requires oppressed people to devise programs, projects, and organizational formations that they control. The professor provides some examples:
“Educational institutions must offer content that advances self-knowledge as well as offering instruction through the demonstrated modalities that build on our strengths. Economic institutions must be built that address our critical survival needs while being consistent with our model of humanity and community. Our religious institutions must be critiqued and developed along lines that foster our spirituality and enhance our collective development.”
This aligns with another modality: problem-solving. Research for research’s sake, to satisfy individual curiosity or attain glory within an intellectual discipline, is deprioritized. Even disciplines themselves are deprioritized. The goal is to craft solutions for the newly built institutions to implement. This inherently leads to an interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) approach. Psychologists, economists, public health researchers, and sociologists—all must work together on research projects. In this work, spirituality must reclaim its place. In addition to physical action and mental labor, researchers must study “faith, prayer and meditation work” to understand how humans truly make sense of the world. Material and immaterial. Seen and unseen.
Taken altogether, the Africentric paradigm offers a larger perspective. This paradigm, which still maintains elements of the Eurocentric paradigm, allows social scientists to deal with the true complexity of human life. It also allows for more questions to be asked and more perspectives to be legitimized. And, eventually, a more human existence for us all.
This paper can be found in the book Akbar Papers in African Psychology.
As the term implies, internal fate control suggests that a person’s future is not subject to spiritual or systemic forces, but rather to one’s behavior and actions.
Have you considered sending this to Dr. Akbar ?