“Intensely white”: psychology curricula and the (re)production of racism

ABSTRACT

Psychology has witnessed an upsurge in discussions around institutional racism as a response to global anti-racist activism following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 by a police officer in Minneapolis, USA. Within academic institutions, students have been challenging institutional racism for years, highlighting how the whiteness of curricula serves to uphold systems of racial injustice. Such calls are often met with denial and sometimes active backlash. Nevertheless, further reflection is crucial if universities and accrediting bodies endorsing educational and professional courses seek meaningful systemic change. Informed by Critical Race Theory, this study uses original empirical data to uncover how students of colour experience psychology curricula by conducting six face-to-face focus groups with 22 undergraduate and postgraduate students of colour on psychology courses at a UK university. Results from reflexive thematic analysis reveal, first, how the psychology curricula are marked by knowledges that (re)produce racism; second, how students are calling for change; and finally, confusion over where responsibility for change lies. We argue that this analysis has important implications for the perpetuation of institutional racism within psychology, academia in general, and subsequent professional psychological practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• psychology
• higher education
• curriculum
• critical race theory

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. “People of colour” refers collectively to people of Arab, Asian, African, and Caribbean descent. In 2018, members of the NUS Black Students’ Campaign voted in favour of using this terminology over more top-down terminology such as BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic). In keeping with these recommendations, we therefore make use of this language in this paper when referring collectively to people who experience racist marginalisation and oppression (National Union of Students Black Students’ Campaign, 2018).

2. A post-1992 university in the UK is a former polytechnic or central institution that was given university status through the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, or an institution granted university status since 1992 without having received a royal charter.