Legal victories may remove injustice, but they do not dismantle the psychological frameworks colonialism left behind

Something happens when a movement such as Black Lives Matter wins what appears to be small victories. When the law changes, when an institution issues an apology (See Cummings & Cummings, 2021, Historical chronology: Examining psychology's contribution to the belief in racial hierarchy and perpetuation of inequality for people of colour in U.S.), when a policy is rewritten, there is often a moment of collective exhale. A sense that something important has shifted. That perhaps the struggle has moved forward, that the world has, in some small way, become more just. 

And yet, slowly and almost bewilderingly, another realisation begins to emerge: the misery has not left. The fear has not left. The way people hold their bodies in certain rooms has not left. The way they second-guess their thoughts, they way they apologise for taking up space, the way they scan environments before speaking—none of these was ever written into the policy. 

This is the problem that philosopher Lewis R. Gordon names with precision in his essay When Justice is Not Enough. Gordon (2018) argues that struggles for liberation are typically framed as struggles against injustice. That framing is necessary. But it is not sufficient. 

The deepest injury of colonialism was not only the theft of land, labour, and political power. It was the colonisation of normative life itself: the framework through which societies decide what counts as human, what counts as rational, and what counts as worthy of dignity and care. 

You can dismantle an institution without dismantling the framework it leaves behind.

And it is that framework—still operating, still shaping what feels normal, what feels possible, what feels enough—that brings people into my consulting room. 

The Wound Beneath the Wound

Frantz Fanon the revolutionary psychiatrist and Black Africana existential thinker whose work Gordon draws extensively, observed something that every Black Africana therapist working with Black clients knows in their bones: colonised and racially subordinated people are perceived as committing violence simply by appearing.

Not actual violence, but violence attributed to them by a social order whose legitimacy was built upon their exclusion. 

To show up, to assert selfhood, to take up space in a system not built for you is already to be perceived as transgressive. The Black body becomes read as disruption, excess, or threat.

That perception does not remain outside the person. It settles in the body. It shapes the psyche long after the formal structures of oppression are challenged. 

What Gordon calls the decolonisation of normative life is therefore not a political slogan. It is a clinical description of what deep healing actually requires. 

It is not enough to tell a Black client that they are worthy (human). It is not enough to practices anti-oppressive listening skills, adopt cultural humility, or introduce new language that promises transformation while leaving the structure intact. 

The deeper question is this: whose standards are these based on? 

Measured against what archetype of the human? 

If the norms by which a person evaluates themselves were constructed within a system that excluded them, then self-acceptance within that framework is not liberation. 

It is a more sophisticated form of captivity. 

This insight sits at the heart of my work through the Africana Critical Race Framework (ACRF™️). ACRF begins from the premise that anti-Blackness is not simply a matter of prejudice or inequality but an ontological condition embedded within the normative foundations of modern social life. 

The task, therefore, is not merely institutional reform but the interrogation of the frameworks that determine whose humanity is recognised in the first place. 

What This Means in Practice

As a Black Africana existential psychotherapist, I hold this tension every day. 

The therapy I was trained in was largely developed within Western individualist tradition. The self becomes the primary unit of analysis. the goals are psychological autonomy, resilience, and self-actualisation. 

These are not trivial assumptions. 

But they are partial. 

When applied without critique to Black clients navigating anti-Black worlds, they can inadvertently ask people to adapt more effectively to structures what are injuring them. 

Lewis R Gordon, along with many other Black Africana thinkers, offers a language for imagining an alternative. Therapy that seeks to decolonise normative life must begin by questioning the frameworks through which the mind has learned to interpret itself. Otherwise everything remains the same—only rebranded. 

In such a space the questions begin to change. 

Not only:
What are your patterns? 

But also: 
Who taught you that those patterns were problems? 

Not only: 
Why do you regulate to yourself?

But also: 
What are  you regulating yourself against, and who benefits from your silence? 

Not only: 
How do you build resilience? 

But also: 
Resilience to return to what, exactly? 

This is not a therapy that abandons the individual. 

On the contrary, it is therapy that sustains the individual honestly—in history, in structure, and in the ongoing weight of a world that has not yet completed its reckoning. 

The African philosophical tradition of Ubuntu reminds us that personhood is constituted in relation. Gordon reminds us that the norms governing those relations were themselves colonised. 

Together they point toward what genuine healing demands: not adjustment within a broken system—as we so often see within the psy-disciplines (Cummings & Cummings, 2021)—but the slow, difficult, and necessary work of building a new ground on which to stand. 

It is within this space that the Africana Critical Race Framework (ACRF™️) situates therapeutic work. Rather than treating distress solely as an individual pathology, ACRF invites us to read suffering in relation to the historical and structural conditions that shape the meaning of being human. 

Healing, in this sense, is not simply about self-acceptance within existing norms. 

It is about interrogating the norms through which humanity has been organised. 

Justice may remove the boot from the neck. 

But it does not teach the neck that it is free. 

That is the work that remains


About This Essay

This essay forms part of the Afrolantica Series, a collection of reflections by Dr Derek McKenzie exploring the psychological, philosophical, and therapeutic dimensions of decolonising the mind. 


References

Lewis R. Gordon. "When Justice Is Not Enough: Toward Decolonisation of Normative Life, "in Geopolitics and Decolonisation: Perspectives from the Global South, edited by Fernanda Frizzo Bragato and Lewis R. Gordon (Rowan & Littlefield International, 2018)

Cummings, D. & Cummings, N. (2021) Historical chronology: Examining psychology's contribution to the belief in racial hierarchy and perpetuation of inequality for people of colour in U.S. American Psychological Association.  https://www.apa.org/about/apa/addressing-racism/historical-chronology
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