The Manichean division in children’s experience: Developmental psychology in an anti-Black world

Developmental perspectives and humanity transformation projects

Contemporary research in developmental psychology is oriented towards a relational developmental systems metatheory, and what this means is that new studies nested within this metatheory presume mutually influential relations among all elements of the individual and the world (the lifeworld), with the individual being actional in their own development and maturation (Overton, 2013). For developmental psychologists explicitly addressing issues of race, ecological models within the relational developmental system’s metatheoretical view have been the dominant approach, with Spencer’s (2006) Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) and Garcia-Coll et al.’s (1996) Integrative Model being the most comprehensive available. Spencer’s (2006) PVEST and Garcia-Coll and colleagues’ Integrative Model (1996) are rooted in Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model (Brofenbrenner & Morris, 2006). As such, both presuppose that child and adolescent development occurs within nested systems that are hierarchically organized. Further, proximal processes in the child or adolescent’s immediate context are the mechanism for development as well as the primary focus of study and intervention. The multiple layers of context assumed in PVEST are an extension of Bronfenbrenner’s perspective to integrate a phenomenological perspective that allows greater attention to meaning-making by individuals, which is particularly relevant for understanding youth’s navigation of a racist society and their sense of identity beyond proximal processes. PVEST emphasizes stress, protective factors, risks, and coping. This opens the door to explaining how various social relations must also be understood in terms of how they are experienced by Black youth, permitting attention to experiences that are specific to those occupying stigmatized social positions instead of inappropriately assuming the experiences of those in dominant social positions are universal. The Integrative Model similarly enabled the experiences of working-class Black youth to the center of developmental psychology studies by foregrounding contextual factors that uniquely affect racialized groups. Building on assets-based studies of African American and Puerto Rican children and families, the Integrative Model explicitly added the following contributors: social position variables (race, social class, ethnicity, gender), racism/prejudice/discrimination/oppression, segregation (residential, economic, social, psychological), promoting/inhibiting environments (schools, neighborhoods, health care), adaptive culture (traditions, cultural legacies, economic and political histories, migration and acculturation, current contextual demands), family (structure and roles, family values, beliefs, goals, racial socialization, socioeconomic status), and developmental competencies (including biculturalism and coping with racism). Importantly, the Integrative Model’s adaptive culture component includes economic and political history; in the groundbreaking paper elaborating the Integrative Model, a history of colonization by both Spain and the United States was explicitly named as a specific contributor to Puerto Rican youth’s development, receiving an ostensibly unavoidable placement in the model. Yet, developmental psychologists typically examine development with a focus on the ontogenetic domain, or the individual lifespan. To a lesser degree, developmental psychologists examine the phylogenetic domain through an evolutionary lens (e.g., Bjorklund & Pellegrini, 2000; Geary & Bjorklund, 2000) and very few address the microgenetic domain, often in studies of cognitive development (e.g., Marti, 1994; Ruvalcaba et al., 2015; Siegler & Crowley, 1991). Yet, a critique implicit in sociohistorical perspectives that we find relevant to the present discussion is that there is insufficient attention to the sociogenetic domain, which is particularly concerning if we agree that these multiple domains are all part of how relational developmental systems function. Few developmental psychology research programs engage the cultural–historical domain as if it were as important or crucial for making sense of the glut of work exclusively addressing ontogenesis (for exceptions see Alcalá et al., 2014; Hardaway et al., 2012; Kiang et al., 2016; McLoyd, 2006, 2016; Rogoff et al., 2005). Importantly, insufficiently addressing the relationships between these genetic domains also runs counter to the antireductionist goals of the relational dynamic systems perspective, leading some to argue that recent iterations of relational dynamic systems perspectives would benefit from engaging with the Vygotskyan sociohistorical tradition more deeply (Karimi-Aghdam, 2016; Stetsenko, 2016). There has been limited research specifically about Black youth’s experiences of racialization conducted using a sociohistorical psychology lens and an explicitly critical orientation (e.g., Duncan, 2005); instead, much of this work happens outside psychology entirely (e.g., Kerrison et al., 2018; Okpalaoka, 2014; Windle, 2008). On the issue of social transformation as a goal, Stetsenko (2015, 2016) goes a step further and notes the ways that the undervalued Vygotskyan sociohistorical emphasis on the cultural–historical domain’s importance also includes political commitment to social change rather than the more common tone of value neutrality found in psychological research more broadly. Accordingly, Vianna and Stetsenko (2011) previously discussed a transformative activist stance that can be readily applied in studying developmental phenomena. Long (2014) makes a similar criticism of psychology more broadly, noting that psychology has been unprepared to offer relevant responses to social upheaval and instead has benefitted from its metatheoretical limitations being less obvious during more stable periods. Further, Long explains, failure to acknowledge political interests has had the effect of promoting marketization of both science and education. Hence, the persistent backgrounding of political questions has important consequences beyond researchers’ topics of study, as well.

Taken together, these issues indicate that research on Black youth’s development is bounded by the limits of current understandings of relational developmental systems metatheory, despite the existence of models like PVEST and the Integrative Model that openly name structural and historical contributors to developmental processes. Central to the current limitations of how relational developmental systems theory is applied is the failure to address the presumed value neutrality that is the default in developmental psychology and the ways that impedes discussions of sociogenesis and the cultural–historical domain. Here, we conclude that while these two culturally sensitive models are major advancements and should be applied in relational developmental systems research more broadly, critical developmental scholars who are concerned with achieving social transformation should heed the analytic and practical limitations of relational developmental systems research as it currently exists. Specifically, while researchers applying the dominant frameworks can readily study Black children and adolescents’ normative development without being required to provide an explicit deficit-oriented comparison to the normative development of White children and adolescents, the dominant framework still leaves the conception of humanity unproblematized. Most importantly, the researcher’s role in social transformation is relegated to producing research articles with an apolitical tone in hopes that powerful others will act upon self-evident and presumed universally palatable recommendations. For a critical developmental researcher, this is an inappropriate path: it is an untenable position if one accepts the premise that researchers’ positionality is not only racialized, but embedded in class relations ³ that permeate social relationships according to a critical epistemology (Arfken, 2018; Cohen, 1997; hooks, 2000; Pickren, 2018). It also is an incompatible position considering past work discussing how knowledge production is implicated in producing oppressive social structures and the ways epistemic violence can affect the daily lives of people facing the repercussions of coloniality (Bhatia & Priya, 2018; Quijano, 2000; Wynter, 2003). In the case of scholarship on African-diaspora youth’s development, the implication is that Black invisibility is reproduced and there looms a foreclosure of an alternative future where Black can indeed be human (Fanon, 1952/2008; Gordon, 1995b; Lorde, 1984). Further, for critically minded developmental psychologists, this is not merely a matter of individually disagreeing with the theoretical assumptions one is expected to affirm to confirm belonging in one’s academic field, but also a matter of intellectual honesty and ethical obligation: critical developmentalists need methods and actions that align with our epistemologies and values.

In sum, the unquestioned issues in developmental psychology described here are part of a larger problem in which the ethics of Eurocentric empiricist inquiry remain undiscussed in published developmental psychology research. The normative understanding of the formation of the ethical subject is to follow the prescriptions of dominant morality, but in this article we understand the formation of the ethical subject as through self/other relations as first philosophy. Importantly, while studies indeed are addressing social justice-related constructs as developmental outcomes for youth (e.g., critical consciousness development literature) and more recently infusing intersectionality as a lens for analyses (e.g., Ghavami et al., 2016), these lines of research cannot in themselves remediate the problem of political commitments and researchers’ positionality unless they explicitly address this undiscussed problem and the ways it constrains the questions asked in the field. The current status of relational developmental systems perspectives is equipped to discuss how Black youth can individually survive in the existing yet unnamed anti-Black world. Yet, the unacknowledged dominance of Eurocentric empiricist perspectives and corresponding exclusion of critical perspectives that are implicit in even recent relational developmental systems research facilitates epistemic suppression by contributing to the façade of disinterested objectivity having been attained, which may advance political repression by constraining social change efforts solely to the world of policymaking, rather than affirming that it can legitimately be pursued in collaboration with participants in research and with attunement to the power-laden social relationships in which participants live. Among those who pose a challenge to the problematic theoretical foundations that are the expected starting point for empirical study are action-oriented and practice-minded psychologists who embrace critical epistemologies, such as critical psychologists, cultural–historical activity theorists, and psychologists conducting qualitative research that foregrounds researcher positionality. These lines of research also offer a methodological alternative to the exclusive use of statistical methods, an important part of challenging the unquestioned goals of value-neutrality and objectivity completely freed of all subjectivity (Marecek, 2011). These assumptions dominant in developmental psychology research have not gone uncontested, even within developmental psychology (Stetsenko, 2012; Vianna & Stetsenko, 2011). Despite critical and transformational activist approaches’ role in researchers’ ability to assert a political commitment to social change, researchers who embrace these approaches will likely struggle to fit if the field broadly still downplays researchers’ positionality and disembodied research remains an implicit gold standard. For critical developmentalists, promising aspects of relational developmental systems theories and their corresponding culturally sensitive variants should be applied through a critical lens that attends to the cultural–historical domain if we are to achieve social transformation and a redefinition of the human. In the following sections, we discuss specific applications intended to intervene on coloniality in Black youths’ development.

Distorting childhood and adulthood: Constructions of humanity for an anti-Black world

In a critical intervention to the universalizing tendencies found in empirical research on child development, Erica Burman (2016) asserts that presuppositions around a universal childhood need to be interrogated. She turns to Frantz Fanon’s work to illuminate the vast differences between the impacts of colonialism on the subject formation of the White child and the Black child, focusing explicitly on how the social-symbolic order of White superiority inherent to the modern/colonial project fundamentally distorts the Black child’s sense of self. As Burman (2017) discusses, theories of human development have been exemplars of Eurocentricity in the field of psychology, often by its assumption of a universal human subject while simultaneously enacting colonialist ends in both theory and practice. Indeed, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood are all social constructs that must be interrogated by those in psychology who are interested in better understanding “human development,” but this interrogation carries particular import in this moment that Sylvia Wynter refers to as the “time of Man and its overrepresentation as if it were the human” (2003, p. 331).

To understand and change the developmental experiences of Black youth, it is necessary to understand the role of coloniality in structuring their social environment. Coloniality refers to the longue durée pattern of social relations that operate on a global scale due to the codevelopment of racialization processes involving a biologizing of conquer/conquered relations, the restructuring of labor relations into capitalist ones in the Americas with western Europeans placed at the center, and finally the Americas’ model being exported to make world capitalism the dominant relation of production (Quijano, 2000). Importantly, coloniality as a sociohistorically contextualized phenomenon has been a resource for the construction of identities in an imperial attitude (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Further, this has entailed a perpetual skepticism regarding the full human status of non-European peoples broadly (Pagden, 1982). In line with the larger pattern described by Anibal Quijano, skepticism toward the colonized’s humanity, too, was codified into political and economic structures through the various colonial land and labor institutions: from the encomienda to slavery to peonage, a normative schema of relations between the colonized and the colonizers was created that negated self/other relations.

The rationale of all these colonial institutions was that European men were to be their prime beneficiaries as the only true heirs of God’s kingdom (Pagden, 1982). Drawing from Aristotle, Spanish colonial scholars divided the concept of the human between classifications of Black (natural slave), American Indian (the child), and European (the adult). ⁴ Some of the long-term implications of this debate and its institutionalization as political policy and cultural practice have been well examined by a number of scholars (e.g., Hanke, 1994; Pagden, 1982; Taylor-García, 2018; Wynter, 2003), but particularly relevant for our purposes is the way in which Black African, American Indian, and European differences were explained in ontogenetic terms. The use of racial categories as ontogenetic classifications meant that not only were there purportedly different kinds of people based on cultural differences, but that these different groups evidenced hierarchically organized forms of constitutional difference. These purported constitutional differences in turn shaped what was and would later be deemed “natural” and “universal.” In sum, a key aspect of the negation of self/other relations in this colonial context in the Americas is that Black people were cast as outside the human developmental model of child to adult. Indigenous people of the Americas were cast as a race of children who needed to be raised into adulthood defined as European Christianity, but Black people were cast as natural slaves: those who did not experience maturation in any meaningful sense, and remained in a static state apart from human development (Pagden, 1982). “Mixing” with Europeans could, ostensibly, instigate change in this arrangement for future generations, but the logic of Black and “mixed race” people being outside the normative human schema remained (Katzew, 2005; Martínez, 2008). The historical experiences of Black people should be understood as tied to a dualistic understanding of knowledge that is core to Eurocentric domination in this model: primitive versus civilized, magic/mythic versus scientific, irrational versus rational, and traditional versus modern, all reflect new conceptions of time and space embedded in the Eurocentric logic produced under colonial expansion. In the Eurocentric framework applied during the expansion of capitalism to the global level, the so-called development of western European countries and their people came to be positioned as a normative and prescriptive universalized development for the entire world, resulting in a still-existing myth of Europe as the sole crafter of the modern world (Pagden, 1982). This imposed status as outside of normative humanity also creates the problem of distorted “new world intersubjective” relations, characterized by what Lewis Gordon (2015) has called a “stratified abnormality” as the basis for the recognition afforded to Black people (Quijano, 2000; Wynter, 2003). This depends on a fundamentally unequal relation that requires Black people to be ethically obligated to White people in the colonial context, regardless of there being no expectation of reciprocity (Gordon, 2015). This nonreciprocity has at times been explicitly codified in political structures as reflected in the U.S.’s 1857 Dred Scott decision: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney opined that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit” (U.S. Reports, 1856, p. 407), which he justified as grounded in the U.S. Declaration of Independence authors’ intent since “the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration” (p. 410). Beyond the way Black people have been constructed in the eyes of colonial forces, there are also material practices common in imperial capitalist expansion that result in epistemic suppression, where peoples’ indigenous forms of knowledge production, models of meaning-making, forms of expression, and subjectivities were repressed during colonization (Child, 2000; Lajimodiere, 2019; Lomawaima, 1995; Miranda, 2010; Oyěwùmí, 1997; Quijano, 2000; Trafzer, 2006; also see Gordon, 1995a and Maldonado-Torres, 2017, for additional relevant discussion). This equation of Black people with the “natural slave” is definitive of anti-Black racism today and produces Black invisibility: the experience of having one’s presence erased, personhood denied, point of view refused, plurality or diversity flattened to nonexistence, and position defined as incapable of reason (Gordon, 1995b, 2018). The role of colonialism in the development of the global capitalist system not only introduced a new material social relation involving literal slaves and masters in an antagonistic division of labor, it also introduced an ontological shift that positioned Black people as nonhuman and persists beyond the material end of colonialism and slavery, operating as a facet of coloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2017). In what Julia Suárez-Krabbe (2016) refers to as “the death project,” the abovementioned ontological shift transformed self/other relations to normative and prescriptive lordship/bondage relations through daily interactions as well as the institutions that were established. In sum, colonial/racial projects produced an ontological shift in tandem with the transformed division of labor; this shift exceeded the boundaries of any one colonial project as different European countries became involved.

What does it mean, then, to speak about “youth development” across the colonial/racial divide as not only an issue of material inequality, but also of sociality and subjectivity? ⁵ Any attempt to change the anti-Black world rather than simply describe or explain it would require explicit reflexivity by researchers, yet, as we have already argued, this is nonnormative practice in developmental psychology or psychology more broadly. We argue that this amounts to epistemic suppression, allowing anti-Black racism to thrive, as the possibility of articulating an affirming conception of humanity and knowledge is foreclosed. Considering the limitations of developmental psychology literature, fields such as sociology and education become relevant when seeking empirical support to illustrate how anti-Black racism and coloniality play a role in the daily lives of Black youth. For Black youth, this means encountering a world whose skeptical attitude towards their humanity is not merely restricted to those individuals who endorse explicitly bigoted views, but also to institutions that fail to see and address the reality of anti-Black racism. Some examples of Black youth’s experiences with anti-Black racism include experiencing surveillance in schools and on the streets, receiving disproportionately punitive measures for what would otherwise be seen as childish misbehavior, and pressure to demonstrate one’s value as a “moral migrant” through ethnic projects or demonstrating one’s value as respectable or “less African” or “less Spanish” by stigmatizing immigrants and working-class Black peers (Clay, 2018; Dumas & ross, 2016; Duncan & McCoy, 2007; Fields, 2005; Gregory et al., 2010; Morris, 2016; Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012; Phoenix, 2004, 2009, 2011; Phoenix et al., 2003; Rios, 2011; Wallace, 2018, 2019; Watson & Knight-Manuel, 2017). Further examples include being seen as exotic and proximal to nonhuman animals, having one’s immigrant status be seen as detrimental to society, and having one’s nation of origin be seen as benefitting from its dominated position within imperialist social relations (Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012; Watson & Knight-Manuel, 2017). Finally, there are also experiences of having one’s community be disinvested from such that youth unemployment and child poverty are widespread, having one’s community’s displacement be seen as socially good for economic development, and being victim-blamed after being subjected to racist violence (Childs, 2015; Gilmore, 2007; Long, 2017; Martinot & Sexton, 2003; Smith & Ashiabi, 2007).

While current perspectives can only classify these examples as particularities, we see these examples as instead counterevidence against the claims of an achieved universal body of knowledge; we argue this is indicative of the consequences of believing our neutrally stated research findings will ensure social transformation independent of our political commitments, as anti-Black racism persists. The material conditions are imbricated in the social-symbolic order and mutually reinforce sedimented perceptions, viscerally shaping face-to-face interactions across racial differences. As Burman (2016) notes, the social-symbolic co-ordinates of children living in the racial/colonial context will differ significantly along racial lines, thus there is no universal childhood subject in an anti-Black world. Above and beyond the nonreciprocal ethics applied to Black adults, the colonial/racial social-symbolic code imposed on Black youth further denies the protections or care that should normally accompany interactions with children as a category. In fact, quite the opposite occurs: Black children are often seen as not needing the same level of care (Epstein et al., 2017) and reasons commonly used to justify killing or disproportionately incarcerating Black youth include claiming adult White men and women instead need care and protection from Black youth. This is a startling reversal of the child/adult order, both for the Black child as an individual, but also for the relationship between the White adult and the Black child. In the colonial/racial social-symbolic order, the White adult is transformed into an infant in need of protection while the Black child is bereft of implicitly egalitarian ontogenetic qualities.

Accordingly, an account of these social structures and one’s relationship to those structures must be the beginning of any psychological analysis. Individual subjectivity and sedimented structures are coconstitutive and thus an account of reality is essential. This is what Fanon (1952/2008) is arguing when he states that “a normal black child, having grown up in a normal family, will become abnormal at the slightest contact with the white world” (p. 122). This role of examining reality is a central necessity in phenomenological philosophy, as “the real must be described, not constructed or formed” (Merleau-Ponty, 2010). There is a reality that exists before developmental psychologists begin writing theories and recommendations for how to best promote healthy development. Acknowledging this coconstitution means understanding that the individual is facing a world they have inherited and that the individual is in fundamental relationship with social structures. It is in this inherited context that the Black child’s possible responses and actions can be identified. Describing the real requires paying attention to the individual–structure relationship as well as the perspectives of those who have been excluded from centers of knowledge production in the field of psychology. Accordingly, colonialism and anti-Black racism as a matter of ontology need to be clearly interrogated.

Enter the human in developmental psychology: An unapologetically decolonial attitude

We have argued that while some developmentalists have described the material world in which Black youth develop (e.g., Garcia-Coll et al., 1996; Spencer, 2006) and others have described the Black youth’s self-making in these same contexts (e.g., Rogers et al., 2015; Seaton et al., 2017), all of the contextualized processes developmentalists have described in their work should be understood as occurring in the historical aftermath of formal colonial relations and in the context of a world capitalist system today. As highlighted in previous sections of this paper, understanding coloniality and anti-Black racism requires simultaneously accounting for economic, political, and ideological features of the lived experience of being Black in an anti-Black world. Dominant metatheoretical assumptions in developmental psychology bound our methods, constrain our ability to seriously engage the meaning of “childhood” for working-class Black people in an anti-Black world, and ignore the importance of the ethical field to those positioned as nonhuman through world capitalism’s historical coevolution with coloniality. Many of the analyses explicitly invoking the issues of ethics and reflexivity originate outside the discipline (e.g., Ibrahim, 2014; Long, 2017), suggesting challenges for scholars within developmental psychology seeking a humanizing approach but beholden to perspectives within developmental psychology’s mainstream. Examples of work acknowledging anti-Black racism or the role of colonialism published in developmental psychology journals are often from interdisciplinary scholars and in theory-oriented venues (e.g., Bang et al., 2012; Lee, 2012). This article itself emerges from an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophy, psychology, and ethnic studies. Refuting that an anti-Black world exists by returning to the claims of an academic discipline that has not centrally interrogated the impact of colonialism and world capitalism on the lifeworld is definitively, on its own terms, invalid. For critical psychologists studying Black youth’s development across the globe, a departure must be made from objectifying research methods and toward ethical obligations beyond the production of academic journal articles or the authorial power obtained in academic theory production (see Ibrahim, 2014).

Accordingly, our goal here is to create possibilities to educate people to be actional and transformative, to preserve in all their relations their respect for the basic values that constitute a human world (Fanon, 1961/2007). To be clear, redefining the human is not about keeping the modern definition intact, especially not in the iterations of national or international legal statutes, but rather about ushering in a new time of human relations (Fanon, 1961/2007; Gordon, 1995b; Wynter, 2003). Accordingly, simple reconfiguration or shuffling of existing relations that allow Black people to occupy roles of power inside current structures are not sufficient and, in some cases, may reify the anti-Black racism we seek to undermine. The humanity transformation task can be achieved through an unapologetically decolonial attitude. A decolonial attitude is the first principle in ideological and cultural orientations, as well as sociomaterial action, necessary for addressing coloniality in the present and crafting a new understanding of the human (Maldonado-Torres, 2017; Wynter, 2003). In developmental psychology, having a decolonial attitude entails interrogating theory and methods dominant in psychology and constantly questioning whether we are sufficiently practicing being human through listening and engaging those cast as disposable and unworthy, by facilitating transformational efforts toward a new human science by people dehumanized through coloniality. This approach is in sharp contrast to the default academic position that research is conducted free from ethical or political commitments. The purpose here is first and foremost to struggle toward asserting the humanity of those deemed nonhuman and second for researchers ourselves claiming humanity by refusing to continue the façade of universality in a highly particular and indeed oppressive particularity; these two goals are intertwined and are central in both more clearly understanding our reality and changing it.

Analytically, one avenue by which developmental psychologists can move toward a different understanding of the human and adopt a decolonial attitude is through the act of centering an analysis of coloniality in existential analyses, also known as the decolonial reduction. The decolonial reduction, as proposed by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, challenges the “universality of dominant theories by testing them against the backdrop of realities marked by systematic dehumanization,” leading to “the recognition of the colonial difference, making explicit in the process important epistemological limitations of dominant interpretive approaches,” as was our aim in this article (2008, pp. 99–101). Invoking the decolonial reduction, we call into question the dominant meaning of childhood and adulthood for Black people: coloniality has ideologically negated the normative child–adult trajectory by casting working-class Black youth as things (rather than persons) that are incapable of full humanity and instead are seen as best equipped for low-wage labor, as rationality is presumed beyond their reach. For example, working-class Black youth are offered suboptimal learning conditions and opportunities that channel them away from actualizing their intellectual capacities despite them still being required to participate in compulsory schooling. It is through this decolonial attitude and reduction that the ontogenetic bifurcation in the colonial world becomes evident and emerges as crucial for analyses of contemporary developmental contexts.

Taking this stance requires reflexivity in methods and a rethinking of insider/outsider relationships (Ibrahim, 2014), but coloniality’s enmeshment in world capitalism complicates this further: while developmental psychology as a field can partially resolve the problem of outsiders subjecting communities to highly transactional relationships in service of research by bringing in more Black scholars and scholars from locations presently dominated by imperialism, it becomes much more difficult to resolve the problem of researchers’ classed positionalities, regardless of any given researcher’s class origins, thus highlighting the ongoing need for an explicit critique of capitalism. We are tasked with making sense of human development in a world that is defined by its policing of the division between human and subhuman; we are faced with an anti-Black world that reproduces itself through imperial violence as part of world capitalism (Long, 2017). If researchers’ own classed positions are such that we are directly involved in capitalist class reproduction and are often nonetheless called upon to speak as the authoritative class-free voice of our own colonial/racial groups, an intervention is required (Arfken, 2018).

Critical developmentalists can take cues from decolonial phenomenological and existential philosophy as to how to understand individuals’ consciousness within social worlds and how to appropriately contextualize individual-level processes that are a key feature of developmental psychology research (Martinez, 2000). A fundamental premise in the phenomenological approach is to recognize that the relationship between one and the other cannot be decided solely within the regulations of a particular established scientific discipline. To describe one’s theory as phenomenological is to recognize that the terms on which theoretical validity or normative principles are gained are not through the empirical sciences, but through a process of social construction that is not only at the individual level, but also at the level of cultural formation and sociality (Husserl, 1970, pp. 122–129). In this regard, we suggest a closer examination of key positions taken in decolonial philosophy, for it further deepens the insight that there is a problem in developmental psychology: that a culturally specific, distinctly Eurocentric understanding and experience of being human has been taken as a universal presupposition. “The biological” invokes an understanding of the human as a set of mind-independent properties rather than the relational process of becoming that it is. Accordingly, even the “biological” must be contextualized in relation to the colonial divide. It is in this process of evaluating human morphology across the divide that the sociogenetic principle becomes evident.

Further, participatory research methods offer promise, as this orientation in research has the possibility of fostering an ethical relationship between researchers who pursue decolonial projects in developmental psychology. Importantly, this is not merely a matter of researchers feeling ethical by forming relationships with participants or a matter of researchers being able to say they are not guilty of being undemocratic, but rather the pursuit of collaboration toward the self-emancipation of the oppressed. Considering the forms of anti-Black racism Black youth experience in daily life, when looking to understand the various ways Black youth respond to mainstream educational interactions or experience outcomes that diverge from those of White youth, we should start from considering this as a lived experience defined by denying working-class Black youth the vulnerability of childhood and the use of coercive measures to achieve discipline within capitalist societies. Similarly, when looking to understand what would constitute optimal developmental outcomes for Black youth, we should start by considering the ways that coloniality has produced their current lived experience, how coloniality has constrained what they may articulate as their needs, and the ways that coloniality informs their stated aspirations. The decolonial reduction, which requires centering the human being of the colonized, can then create conditions in which we can meaningfully differentiate the simple boredom of a tired Black youth who is distracted in school from instances better understood as the spontaneous rebellion of Black youth that emerges like the spark of a fire to affirm one’s humanity in a dehumanizing system. Both in the current world are often collapsed into “bad behavior,” maintaining anti-Black stereotypes and foreclosing the possibility of further developing the latter into a political consciousness commensurate with social transformation in service of Black youth’s own long-term and intergenerational well-being. The decolonial reduction is the first act in affirming the ordinariness of Black youth’s behavior, an ordinariness that is denied in an anti-Black world, as well as affirming their actional and socially transformative potential. Through the decolonial reduction, we can understand that stifling both the ordinariness in Black youth’s basic lived existence and stifling actual revolt in Black communities is a key goal of modern/colonial capitalist societies; we can also grasp that pathologization and criminalization are key mechanisms by which this stifling occurs.

One direction for future work to overcome the colonial divide is to invoke the decolonial reduction to examine how Black youth construct identities in the face of coloniality with special attention to how lived experiences across sociohistorical contexts inform their engagement with humanity transformation projects. Existing theoretical and empirical work can provide guidance for this line of inquiry. For example, Awad Ibrahim’s (2017) ethnographic hanging out methodology and Bradbury and Miller’s (2010) fusion of Vygotskyan cultural–historical theory with narrative perspectives on identity both offer relevant tools for explorations of identity in relation to coloniality. Future explorations of identity in the face of coloniality can focus squarely on questions that can advance the interests of working-class Black youth’s own communities organizing autonomously to maintain an action orientation in the research, offering a means to seriously engage the intertwinement of recognition and the division of labor as foundational to anti-Black racism. Participatory methods can provide further insight into what is needed in these communities and mitigate the tendency of researchers to exclude communities from the research design phase. Working-class Black youth can then be approached as deeply knowledgeable theorists of the structures that render their own childhood irrelevant, with the goal of promoting working-class Black youth’s own humanity transformation efforts. Another related line of work would be explorations of ways that Black youth have humanizing experiences in social activities beyond political organizing or explicitly political projects, but again with a recognition of the intertwinement of recognition and the division of labor in anti-Black racism. These kinds of studies could include reflection on what constitutes a humanizing experience during the research process itself as its own form of scholarship, although researchers should remain open to the possibility that we have not actually fostered a humanizing experience despite our efforts, particularly in neoliberal times. Importantly, all these kinds of research would be severely limited if conducted solely in North American contexts: coloniality was birthed specifically through colonialism’s role in capitalist expansion and these transnational relations have yet to be ruptured (Quijano, 2000; Quijano & Wallerstein, 1992). Accordingly, it is critically important that work be done in postcolonial contexts less frequently given consideration when studying the Black experience in psychology (e.g., the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, Australia). More research is needed to understand how intersubjective relations characteristic of coloniality are reproduced in the absence of formal colonial political structures.

In sum, we see numerous possibilities for politically committed research that addresses decoloniality generally and anti-Black racism specifically. The call for politically committed research is timely, considering the need for a response to anti-Black racism in the world more generally. For the oppressed there is a longing for a future that is unlike the present conditions. Across all the kinds of research projects discussed in this section, researcher reflexivity should remain a crucial focus, specifically as it relates to researchers’ own classed positionalities situated in transnational context. If we as researchers do not accurately and honestly represent our own place in a world where coloniality is pervasive, we risk another inappropriate claim to universality: one that, for example, asserts a class-specific Black experience in the U.S. and North America as the universal Black experience. Accordingly, being reflexive requires recognizing and correcting the glaring U.S.-centered psychology literature and requires engaging the question of the imperialist capitalist relations from which such a U.S.-centered lens emerges (Stevens et al., 2017). We see this as a prerequisite for formation of solidarities considering coloniality’s transnational and international structure and we believe this extends beyond the research world to the field of activist engagement, with reflexivity being a prerequisite for solidarities across racialized groups in activist work. Finally, we see a wider value of a decolonial attitude in psychology broadly, as well. A decolonial approach may help address the recent resurgence of scientific racism in the U.S. (Wade, 2015), in which proponents argue against the existence of entire fields, such as Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies, by invoking mythologies of a modern world uniquely created by western Europe through capitalist interventions to advance neoliberal projects (Winston, 2018). The decolonial approach can help redress ethno-centrist perspectives in developmental psychology and psychology more generally by stripping away the veneer of universality, making clear unacknowledged coloniality, and offering a more justifiable science of the human experience.

Conclusion

In conclusion, to overcome the colonial divide, we begin by affirming working-class Black children’s experiences with coloniality in the world capitalist system as a starting point for developmental psychologists. A fundamental commitment in decoloniality is to listen to the voices of those deemed irrelevant or disposable in our current sociality. To identify the voices that have been excluded one must be listening to those protesting, conducting an analysis of structural conditions, identifying who are the most vulnerable, and prioritizing addressing the problems they face. When conducting psychological analyses, the relationship between individuals and social structures must be foundational in the analysis, instead of insufficiently contextualized processes. An analysis of the structural conditions that Black youth face will reveal class, as well. Supporting efforts to organize for economic self-determination at a community level emerges here as an important part of the therapeutic solution. When speaking of optimizing developmental outcomes, critical developmental psychologists with a decolonial orientation should ask for whom and under what conditions these outcomes are optimal, asserting a challenge to the imperial attitude wherever it resurfaces. A decolonial attitude in developmental psychology will allow us to not only describe or explain how Black youth develop, but also change the conditions in which Black youth develop such that humanity is something all are afforded. Accordingly, this approach will hopefully help expand our notions of universality for a renewed humanity that exists not only in academic theory, but also in practice.