Values, Customs, and Traditions

In reminding ourselves that culture is a complex constellation of mores, values, customs, and traditions that provide a general design for living and a pattern for interpreting reality, it is important to understand the context in which that war was waged. Given that the cultural sterility within traditional psychology was quite pronounced, it was incumbent upon professionals and students alike to engage in a battle that was waged on four fronts. These fronts include: a war of ideology, a war of values, a war of self-determination, and a war of cultural relevance. This, we believe, is what the Association of Black Psychologists has been about for the past four decades.

WAR OF IDEOLOGY The ideological conflict centered on who and what African people are. Black psychologists were right to argue, as Hilliard  reminds us, that there is something wrong with a psychology and a psychological prospective that leaves any group of people strangers to them- selves, aliens to their culture, oblivious to their condition, and inhuman to their oppressors. Furthermore, Carter G. Woodson, in his groundbreaking work on The Mis-Education of the Negro, reminds us that if you allow people to control the way you think, you do not have to assign them to an inferior status; if nec- essary, they will seek it for themselves. Indeed, it has been a war of ideology.