The most dangerous place for a Black person is in  the imagination of white people - Claudia Rankin, cited in Cooke and Webb (2025, p. 96) 

A Contradiction at the Centre

This imagination is not abstract. It is structured through temporality, distortion, erasure, and tokenism, and extends into any training or practice that remains centred within it. 

There is a contraction at the heart of counselling and psychotherapy. We are told that Euro-American theories can be adapted to meet the needs of those they were never designed for, that with enough cultural awareness, humility, or anti-oppressive intention, these frameworks can be made to work for everyone. 

Yet this raises a simple but necessary question: why must those who were historically excluded, misrepresented, or dehumanised by these frameworks now be asked to adapt to them? 

The issue is often framed as one of inclusion, as though psychotherapy simply needs to catch up with a more diverse world. But this framing obscures something more fundamental. 

These theories did not emerge in neutral conditions. They were developed within historical and cultural contexts shaped by coloniality (Quijano, 2007; Wynter, 2003), carrying assumptions about the self, time, and what it means to be human that reflect a particular worldview rather than a universal one.

What presents itself as neutral is, in fact, the expression of what I term the colonised normative—a historical produced standard of the human that conceals its origin while positioning itself as universal. 

Within this frame, the problem is not that Black Africana life was accidentally left out. It is that the frameworks themselves were never designed to hold us. 

The Colonised Normative

In response, the profession has introduced concepts such as cultural competence, cultural humility, and anti-oppressive practice. These are often presented as progressive developments. 

However, in practice, they function as mechanisms for managing difference within existing frameworks, rather than questioning the dominance of those frameworks themselves. 

The question is rarely whether the frameworks are sufficient, but how they might be applied more effectively to those who do not fit them. This is reform, not transformation (Ahmed, 2007). 

As Lewis Gordon argues through his call to decolonise the normative life, what is taken as normal is not neutral but historically produced. 

Extending this, the issue is not simply exclusion, but the persistence of a colonised normative—through which Euro-American assumptions about being, knowledge, and personhood are universalised and maintained. 

Within this structure, Black existence becomes intelligible only through deviation, adaptation, or distortion, never as a grounding point in its own right. 

Evidence and What Can Be Seen

We are often told that psychotherapy (what works) is 'evidence-based,' as though evidence itself were neutral, objective, and universally accessible. 

Yet, as Lewis R. Gordon reminds us, "evidence sometimes suffers from a peculiar problem—it is not always evident".

What this reveals is the evidence does not simply appear; it must be recognised as such within a particular framework of understanding.  In other words, evidence is not self-evident—it is mediated.

This becomes critical when considered through the colonised normative. If what counts as evidence is structured within a framework that does not recognise Africana temporality, relationality, or ways of being, then those realities cannot appear as evidence at all. 

They remain unseen, not because they are absent, but because the conditions for their recognition have not been met. 

As Gordon further notes, evidence is summoned in relation to what is absent. 

The question, then, is not simply what is present, but what has been rendered absent in order for certain forms of knowledge to appear valid. 

In this sense, so-called evidence-based practice can be understood not as neutral, but as an extension of epistemic authority.

It reflects what Gordon describes as the tendency for evidentiality of evidence to become an affirmation of disciplinary authority. 

Rather than adjusting itself to the realities it encounters, the discipline demands that reality conform to its methods. What does not fit is excluded, reinterpreted, or pathologised. 

Decapitated and Lynched

To name the lived experience of this more precisely, I draw on and extend Molefi Kete Asante's Afrocentric critique (Asante, 2009). 

Decapitation refers to the severing of culture, history, and ways of knowing from the person. Within training and practice, this occurs when individuals are required to interpret their experiences through frameworks governed by the colonised normative—frameworks that disconnect them from their own epistemological and ontological grounding. 

The person remains, but their cultural orientation has been cut off. 

Lynching, extended conceptually, refers to the distortion and punishment of Black ways of being when they appear. 

Within the therapeutic space, this can take the form of misrecognition, pathologising, or subtle correction, where ways of speaking, relating, or understanding the world are rendered problematic because they do not align with dominant norms. 

What is produced is a condition in which Black existence is either severed from its grounding or made visible only through distortion. 

When the Centre is Challenged

These dynamics become especially visible when the dominance of Euro-American frameworks is challenged. 

As Black practitioners and scholars move to centre their own cultural perspectives and ways of knowing, a familiar response (reaction) emerges. 

Terms such as 'perceived racism,' calls for 'cultural humility,' and claims that 'the world is becoming more divided' begin to circulate. 

But the world has always been divided. 

What is being disrupted is not unity, but the long-standing and largely unchallenged position of the centre. 

In this sense, what Immanuel Wallerstein described as the rapport de force has been in motion long before the Second World War and has become louder since. 

Radical Love and Its Limits

In response to these tensions, some have turned to the language of 'radical love' as a way of addressing division within the field. 

Yet the question remains: who is being asked to extend this radical love—and toward whom?

As with many rebranded concepts, the invocation of the term does not alter the underlying balance of power. 

The rapport de force remains in tact:

- Power is structured, not incidental

- Power is historical, not past

- Power is ontological and epistemic, not just economic

Power shapes: 

- Who is human

- Whose knowledge counts

- Whose time is continuous

Words do not shift power by being simply invoked. 

There is a historical resonance here. Martin Luther King Jr. called for love in the face of extraordinary violence—while police dogs were set on protestors, while churches were bombed, while Black bodies were lynched and burned (strange hanging fruit).

This was radical. But was made within a clearly defined asymmetry. 

To invoke 'radical love' now without naming that asymmetry, risks something else. It risks transforming a historical grounded ethical stance into a generalised expectation—one in which those who continue to experience violence (spiritual, physical, epistemical, and ontological) are asked, once again, to absorb it without altering the conditions that produce it. 

In that sense, 'radical love' can become another expression of the colonised normative. It appears humane. It leaves the rapport de force  and structure intact. 

Beyond Reform

At this point, the profession often turns to solutions: workshops, revised language, new frameworks built on old foundations. These signal movement. But they do not address the underlying question: whose knowledge is recognised as knowledge in the first place?

Without confronting that, reform reproduces what it claims to change (Ahmed, 2007). 

To move beyond adaptation would require something more difficult. It would mean recognising Euro-American psychotherapeutic models as culturally specific rather than universal, and allowing other starting points—Africana understandings of personhood, temporality, and relationality—to ground theory and practice (Diop, 1974; Hanchard, 1999; Gordon, 2000; Fanon, 1967). 

Not adaptation. A shift in ground. 

Where the Work Begins

Some will ask what the solution is as though this can be resolved through a book, a rebranded concept, or a weekend workshop. 

But for Black Africana practitioners, it is not that simple. 

It cannot begin by returning to those whose frameworks have shaped the conditions in the first place and asking how to stand within them differently akin to Black skins in white linguistic masks. 

The work begins elsewhere. 

It begins with the difficult work of stepping outside those frameworks—of confronting what has been internalised and what has been normalised. In other words, the work of decolonising the mind. 

​This is not a slogan. It is not quick. It is not comfortable. 

It is a process—lived, documented, and enacted. 

Through that process, I aim to share, teach, and provide ways of beginning. Not by offering adaptation, but by questioning the ground upon which adaptation has been made necessary. 

Because what must be confronted is not only exclusion. 

It is the norm itself.  


This essay is grounded in the Africana Critical Race Framework (ACRF ™️)