Seeking Womanist-Liberation: Using Testimonios to Drive Anti-Racism in Psychology

Abstract

Eighty-six percent of psychologists are white, leading to implicit and explicit discrepancies, exclusion, and discrimination against people of color in the discipline. Additionally, academia tends to center white, Eurocentric, and male narratives and experiences in psychology which perpetuates oppression of marginalized communities, especially women of color, in psychology. Thus, in this article, we propose a womanist-liberation framework to support radical healing of women of color in psychology and, ultimately, growth of the discipline. We share reflexive narratives called testimonios to describe our experiences as women of color in academia, in the hopes of encouraging reflection, developing insight, cultivating compassion, and inciting social justice action amongst our readers. Lastly, we propose recommendations stemming from a womanist-liberation framework to make psychology more inclusive, responsive, attuned, and liberatory toward the experiences of women of color.

Keywords:

• Liberation psychology
• mujerismo
• testimonios
• womanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.