In 1933, Carter G. Woodson finished writing The Miseducation of the Negro and called for something specific. Not reform of the existing educational structure. Not a better version of the same program. He called for a new program — built on the scientific study of the Negro from within, grounded in African philosophy and African history, oriented toward a people who know themselves well enough to build from what they actually carry rather than imitate what was built to exclude them.

Thirty-five years later, more than two hundred Black psychologists walked out of the American Psychological Association’s annual conference in San Francisco. They did not file a grievance. They built the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi). And they charged the APA, formally, with condoning the white racist character of American society. Their stated mission, from that day forward: the liberation of the African Mind, empowerment of the African Character, and enlivenment and illumination of the African Spirit.

Woodson called for it in 1933. They built it in 1968. It is still standing.

This week I finished The Miseducation of the Negro (chapters 13 through 18), the final turn from diagnosis to prescription on the last day of the 100th Black History Month. The same day I completed Module One of my CABP certification through ABPsi. The Certification in African/Black Psychology. Inside the institution Woodson was describing.

I found ABPsi through Safe Black Space early last year. I attended my first conference last July, where I had the extraordinary privilege of meeting Dr. Wade Nobles and Na'im Akbar. I registered for the CABP around Christmas. The books for this series were ordered by January 11th. None of this was accidental. And still…finishing this book on this day, in this starting my morning with this learning session, I was not prepared for how it would land. That is the thing about Spirit-led timing. You can be walking the path and still be moved when the confirmations come.

These final chapters are where Woodson stops building the case and starts asking what we build instead. And his answer is unambiguous: stop imitating.

The formation in imitation, the curriculum that shows you what others have accomplished and sends you out to duplicate it, does not produce liberation. It produces fragmentation. It produces the fifty insurance companies that should be one, and the nonprofit organizations competing for the same shrinking pool of resources with no coordination and neither one surviving. These are not failures of character. These are the documented outputs of a program that was working exactly as designed.

Woodson says:

The most inviting field for discovery and invention is the Negro himself. Not what the dominant culture built. Not what they will permit us to enter. What lives in us. What we carry that no one else carries. What we can offer the world that the world will not get from anyone else.

Module One of the CABP opened with the Kemetic seven-element model of the human being. Ka — the physical form. Ba — the breath of life. Khaba — emotion and motion. Akhu — thought and mental perception. Seb — the eternal soul. Putah — the union of brain and conscious mind, the seat of intentional creation. Atmu — the divine eternal soul.

A complete and integrated understanding of the human being as physical, psychological, spiritual, and cosmic. Not a behavioral unit to be managed. A multidimensional spirit in form, described not just in terms of what a person is but how a person functions in harmony.

This is what was there before the distortion. This is what was stripped when the soul was removed from the discipline and the remainder was called modern science. And this is what ABPsi has been holding and transmitting for 57 years.

The phrase I walked away from today’s session carrying:

if the ancestors are not lost, neither are we.

The knowledge was not destroyed. It was too deeply rooted to be fully reached.

And the institutions our people built, the ones Woodson called for and that generation answered, are part of why.

Reflection Questions for the Week:

Where are you sitting on a gift, a problem, or a perspective that you have not yet fully trusted as the source of something the world actually needs?
Where in your own life are you still petitioning a structure that was designed to exclude you instead of building something that begins from your truth?
The seven-element Kemetic model describes the human being as physical, psychological, spiritual, and cosmic; all of it integrated, none of it separable. What have you been taught to call mental health care that does not account for all of who you are?
It is striking to consider how much historical lies alter the self-awareness of several generations of Africans and their descendants. What is one thing you were taught that you now understand to be a historical lie? What did correcting it cost you, and what did it give you?
Woodson says there is no movement in the world working especially for the Negro. Where are you lending your energy, your resources, or your loyalty to something that will drop you the moment your usefulness expires?
We must awaken the mother-mind in us. What does that mean to you?

You can check out the ">video version of this episode on YouTube.

Arc I: Naming the Distortion (Miseducation Pt. 4)