I was not born with a Black consciousness. I very much doubt anyone could be [ironically] the same applies to Brown, red, white, yellow, or any other kind of racialised consciousness [...] yet we eventually learn, and at times are forced into them (Gordon, 2022)
Black consciousness [...] was a frame of mind through which Blacks would reject all value systems that make them foreigners in a country of their birth (Mangena, 1989)
Mangena (1989) locates this alienation within "a country of their birth." But the violence exceeds geography.
Black consciousness names a condition in which Black people are made foreign not only to land, but humanity itself—within a world that has constructed the human through their exclusion.
This speaks directly to what Gordon (2022) gestures toward: that consciousness is not natural but imposed. The task, then, is not merely return, but re-grounding: a refusal of all value systems that estrange Black humanity from its own ontological primacy.
The Ground We Stand On
Much of what is offered as psychological help in our communities is built on a foundation that was never designed to hold us.
We are trained in systems that have historically misnamed, excluded, and pathologised Black existence, yet we are expected to use those same systems to respond to the very conditions they helped produce.
We are taught to speak in the language of Person-Centred therapy, Psychoanalysis, Cognitive Behavioural approaches, and existential psychotherapy, as if these are neutral, universal, and sufficient frameworks for understanding the human condition.
The tension deepens when we, as Black practitioners, come to name ourselves through these same frameworks. To call oneself a person-centred therapist, a CBT practitioner, and existential therapist, or a psychodynamic clinician is not a neutral act of description.
It is to locate one's authority within traditions that were not only historically indifferent to Black life but often structured through its exclusion.
Even where there is critical awareness, and even where the intension is to adapt or expand these models, the naming itself continues to centre whiteness as the temporal ground from which legitimacy is derived.
What appears, on the surface, as professional identification carries a deeper tension. On the one hand, there is a desire to offer meaningful, relevant support to our communities; on the other, there is a continued reliance on frameworks that were never designed to hold the fulness of those communities' lived realities.
This is not a question of individual failing, but structural inheritance.
We are trained within these systems, accredited through them, and often required to speak their language in order to be recognised at all. Yet in doing so, the centre is not displaced—it is reproduced.
Even when we attempt to modify these approaches, to make them more inclusive, or to place "Black" in front of them, nothing fundamental shifts.
The centre remains intact.
This is not transformation. It is extension.
And extension, in this context, is one of the primary ways the centre sustains itself.
Authority, Knowledge, and the Limits of Reform
There is a long-standing warning here. In On Your Own: Evolution of Black Consciousness (Mangena, 1989), Mangaliso Subukwe captured it succinctly when he wrote that what one is "thunders so loudly" ...that what one says cannot be heard.
Steve Biko extended this critique by pointing to a peculiar condition in which those who oppress also position themselves to prescribe solutions—not only kicking the Black man and Black woman but attempting to teach them how to respond to the kick (Mangena, (1989).
To discuss the psychology of oppression is, as Bulhan (1985) reminds us, to pose the question of Euro-American psychology and its relationship to that oppression.
Yet, as he cautions, while the pitfalls of traditional therapies are widely recognised, sanctioned theories and techniques continue to justify the status quo and function as instruments of social control (p. vii)
What sits beneath this is rarely named. These models do not simply exist as tools external to us; they shape how we come to think, how we name distress, and what we recognise as legitimate knowledge.
Over time, this produces a form of conceptual confinement in which even our attempts to resist are routed back through the very frameworks we are trying to move beyond.
The issue, then is not only the violence itself, but the authority that follows it. As Jones (1973) makes clear, what is ultimately at stake is the power to define—to determine whose perspective is afforded philosophical legitimacy, and whose is rendered absent or derivative.
For this reason, dismantling the centre cannot begin with technique. It cannot be resolved by choosing a different model, combining multiple approaches, or adopting an integrative framework.
All remain grounded in the same epistemic and ontological assumptions. It requires a break at the level of authority.
The question is not which therapeutic approach we use, but why we continue to require these approaches to explain Black life at all, even when we know they were not constructed with that life in mind.
What is often presented as a proliferation of therapeutic modalities is, in fact, a variation within a relatively narrow epistemic field—one largely organised around psychoanalytic, behavioural, and humanistic traditions.
This apparent diversity does not signal plurality, but rather the internal expansion of a Euro-American framework that continues to define the terms of legitimacy within psychotherapy.
Bulhan (1985) makes this point with clarity, noting the difficulty of transforming systemic violence through the very theories that sustain it (p. viii).
This dynamic is not confined to overtly political contexts; it is embedded in the knowledge systems we inherit and reproduce. Western philosophy has long functioned as a closed conversation in which white subjects speak to themselves and name their perspective universal (Mangena, 1989; Mills, 1998).
Within this conversation, Black life appears, if at all, as absence, as problem, or as something to be explained from the outside.
Psychological theory has followed a similar trajectory.
What is presented as neutral, objective knowledge is, in fact, a culturally specific understanding of the human that has been preserved, standardised, and exported as if it speaks for everyone.
This is not incidental. As Lezra (2014) demonstrates, the production of knowledge within European modernity relies upon a projection of distortion, where "Europeans invested so fully in images of monstrous Blackness they created, that they could scarcely imagine themselves without them. As false subjects, they needed false objects."
What appears as neutral knowledge is, in this sense, inseparable from the conditions that made such distortions necessary.
In this context what is offered as help must be reconsidered.
When frameworks are applied to Black lives, something more than care is taking place. A form of misrecognition is enacted—not because practitioners lack compassion, but because the frameworks themselves were never designed to hold the fullness of Black being.
This is why those who benefit from the centre—and those positioned within it—continue, decade after decade, to rehash, rebrand, and import concepts such as anti-oppressive practice (Dominelli, 2002), cultural humility (Trevalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998), and pluralism in therapy (Cooper & McLeod, 2011), alongside the proliferation of prefixes such as 'multi', 'cross', and 'trans' cultural, as if the introduction of new terminology or diversification of reading lists can undo the historical and ongoing dehumanisation embedded within both society and the mental health industry.
While such moves may signal a willingness to engage with difference, even in their more recent and increasingly visible forms, they leave untouched the underlying authority that determines what counts as knowledge, what counts as care, and who gets to define both.
To recognise this is not to dismiss these approaches outright, but to locate their limits. They operate within the centre, and as such, they cannot dismantle it.
The issue is not the absence of Black content, but the persistence of a structure that determines in advance how that content can be known, understood, and legitimised.
Under such conditions, decolonisation cannot mean the reconfiguration of frameworks that have already disfigured Black life. It must begin with restorations—remembering and reclaiming the ground of our ways of being, knowing, and existing—across land, our names, epistemology, ontology, and material conditions, including reparations.
When the Map is Mistaken for the Ground
To move differently requires more than critique; it requires recognising when the map has been mistaken for the ground, and in doing so, we have been taught to stand on something that was never built for us.
It requires a shift in where we begin from—one that refuses to treat these frameworks as the ground of our understanding, even when we have been trained to do so.
This does not require discarding what has been learned, but it does require refusing to treat it as foundational. That training may enable us to work with white clients, but it does not follow that it should define the terms through which we understand ourselves or our communities.
This tension is not abstract. It is lived. In my doctoral study, From Behind the Veil: Unveiling the Experiences of Black British-Born Males Navigating Psychotherapy Training Within a White-Dominated Culture, participants (co-researchers) spoke directly to this dislocation. As Sanyu reflected:
We can always break that down further and say explicit and implicit, right? Firstly, I think very much implicit; sometimes, it's explicitly. The [courses] are directed for white clients because that is ... because everyone that is seen as default ... it's only different when it's somebody who's not White. So, I think the default was always about white clients (472-479)
This was not an isolated experience. Another participant Shema, described a similar realisation:
My training ... (pause to think), to be honest, didn't really ... Did it? It trained you to work with White clients, but it didn't train you to work with various clients. There was the slightest bit on diversity. I created my own part on diversity (290-292)
