Seeing through Whiteness:
Reconsider Culture in American Psychology

Syeda Younus Buchwach, George Mason University

In this paper, I will present a perspective on the construction of culture in psychology research. Specifically, I will discuss (a) how culture is conflated with and thus limited to minority race in American psychology research, (b) how White normality in psychology research relates to this construction of culture and reflects broader contextual factors, and (c) why the field should address the erasure of Whiteness as a cultural variable alongside other categories. 

I was prompted to re-evaluate how culture is constructed in psychology research during my first-year psychopathology class. One of the readings assigned by our charismatically contrarian professor was a well-known cross-cultural study comparing the reporting of somatic and psychological symptoms between North American and Chinese populations (Ryder, Yang, Zhu, Yao, Yi, Heine, & Bagby, 2008). When Ryder and his colleagues found differences between the two groups in their sample, they attributed the divergence to a Western tendency to over-psychologize personal experiences. For me, this interpretation of their findings presented a welcome departure from the prevailing usage of Euro-descended samples as a baseline in cultural clinical research. I had grown so accustomed to seeing this benchmark in the literature that I laughed in surprise and highlighted furiously, as grad students are known to do when they are excited by a new idea.

I’ve focused on American research in part because I’ve had limited exposure to international or cross-cultural literature and in part because I think that the distinction is meaningful for my cohort’s training in clinical psychology. American academic psychology has traditionally conceived of culture as a separate research domain, as evidenced by the American Psychological Association (APA)’s decision to designate a single division for the study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race (Division 45, established in 1987).  I did not perform an exhaustive review of the demographics of the 56 divisions of APA, nor do I submit that APA division membership is a valid measure of overall interest in a particular area of psychology. Even so, a simple comparison of membership characteristics sheds light on the structure of American psychological science and practice, since APA is our nation’s accrediting authority. The racial makeup of Division 45 is remarkably different from other divisions. Members, associates, and fellows of Division 45 are reportedly 23% Black, 18% White, 13% Asian, 12% Hispanic, 4% multiracial, and 2% Native American. 28% did not specify their race. By contrast, in APA’s five largest divisions, the percentage of psychologists who identified as a non-white race averages at 6%.[1]  The smallest of these five divisions is 2.5 times the size of Division 45.

I refer to APA membership because my experience at the 2016 Convention in Denver inspired me to think critically about psychological academia’s handling of cultural diversity. Stepping back, I wondered why Division 45 exists at all. Since the construct of culture characterizes the social environment, shouldn’t all applied psychologists consider it as a variable in their analyses? As I became aware of this conceptual separation, I began to question how the science of psychology has been shaped and thus limited by Western hegemony as a legacy of colonialism. Division 45’s designation was actually renamed from Ethnic Minority Issues to Culture, Ethnicity, and Race, which exposes predominant beliefs that culture is only relevant to racial minorities and that our understanding of culture is founded on the separation of racial groups. Diving deeper, it reflects the fact that in the US, White people are not explicitly socialized to think of themselves primarily as belonging to a racial group, but rather as individuals. At the same time, media and other public constructs convey that non-White people are members of a racial group and thus represent a distinct “culture.” These attitudes seep into psychological science despite its aspiration toward impartiality.

Demographic characteristics of APA divisions suggest that interest in culture is disproportionately concentrated in psychologists of color. This trend might also indicate that non-White psychologists focus on culture at the expense of interacting with other domains of psychology. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that cultural research analyzes race and ethnicity as meaningful variables in the human experience. Experiencing race awareness in their daily lives, psychologists of color can appreciate this approach’s acknowledgment that society assumes Whiteness as the norm.

In their paper, Ryder and colleagues implied that the assumption of White normality in psychology has rarely been contested. I believe that this silence reflects a reluctance in American society to acknowledge the impact that political history has had on our understanding of each other and of the world. Perhaps overtly recognizing the lingering psychological effects of colonization and slavery would challenge the Western ideal of a just, humanitarian world order established by Europeans and defended by Americans. It could also create discomfort, as we continue to live with the resource distribution that resulted from those violent political and economic phenomena. International collaborations are freed from these limitations, operating in a global context that relativizes culture rather than treating non-White races as a deviation from general findings. Because Ryder’s team included Canadian and Chinese psychologists, their research avoided the misstep of viewing Chinese society as an “other” from a Western psychological perspective.

It may feel natural and appropriate to approach cultural research as a comparison of racial minorities against European-descended benchmarks--in the context of a racialized society with a dominant White population. However, American researchers do the field a disservice when they study culture without an explicit nod to that context. They consequently miss the opportunity to explore the relationship between White racial identity and American culture. The distinction between the two is becoming increasingly evident as non-White Americans gain prominence and as political changes bring race issues to the forefront of public awareness. Furthermore, immigration trends and social justice movements are disentangling the concepts of nationality, culture, race, and ethnicity.

The limited scope of the “culture” variable as represented in APA Division 45 neglects psychological phenomena unique to White Americans that result from their experience of race in America. “White guilt” is a complex emotional experience that should be explored. Dr. Robin Di’Angelo, a multicultural education researcher who focuses on Whiteness studies, coined a term “White Fragility” to describe the difficulty White Americans encounter when discussing race (2015). For example, the fear of being perceived as racist may prevent White people from engaging in critical dialogues that can amend problematic internalized attitudes about race. Being implicitly aware of race yet unable to freely communicate about it may create cognitive stress and social discomfort when interacting with members of other racial groups. “White fragility” could inhibit self-exploration or keep a potentially rewarding friendship with a non-White person from emotionally progressing.  It could also create tension or distress in interracial romantic relationships or parenting.

When American researchers investigate the relationship between culture and psychological phenomena, we should consider our own cultural biases that result from living in a diverse Western society with a specific racial past and present. Simultaneously, we can dismantle the unspoken bias in the literature by expanding the schema of culture, ethnicity, and race to explicitly include White American and Western categories alongside non-Western groups. Naming this covert variable would enable a purer scientific understanding of our subjects by dissecting the role race plays in self-construal, relationships, and accompanying stressors for all people, not just racial minorities. Whiteness studies already exists as a discipline but is not adequately covered in psychology. It should also be included within multicultural psychology as a requirement in American graduate psychology curricula to prepare well-rounded applied researchers and practitioners.

Beyond recruiting professionals from different backgrounds, we should consider how these psychologists relate to the greater community of psychological scientists around them and vice versa. It feels safe to discuss sensitive topics only with those who proactively care about them, and it also feels safe to avoid sensitive topics altogether because they make us uncomfortable about ourselves, our ancestry, or the world we live in. However, splitting into minority-concern divisions prevents scientists with different perspectives from collaborating to produce sophisticated analyses in all domains of psychology. These scholarly partitions provide a restrictive role model for larger society. I believe that psychology has been granted some authority over semantics in its position as the science of the mind, much like we give the science of physics authority over our understanding of time and space. This unique potential to shift meanings combines with the scientific duty to work toward the betterment of humanity. Perhaps by putting Western hegemony under the microscope, psychologists can understand race well enough to help de-emphasize it as a meaningful variable in the real world, not just in research.

References

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