Ian Miller discusses the relationship between self-esteem psychology and 1960s anti-racist activism, probing what insights this history can offer us today.
In the late 1960s, James Brown abandoned his usual conk hairstyle, flattened down with thick layers of hair gel and chemically straightened to imitate the shorter hair of white men. Instead, Brown sported a more unruly bushy, natural afro. His music became more provocative. In his popular 1968 song, Black and Proud, he preached that ‘Black folk need to respect themselves’ and chant “I’m Black and I’m proud!” Around the same time, in the controversial film genre of blaxploitation, Black actors reclaimed the power of depiction of their ethnicity by exuding a new-found self-confidence, and playing powerful leading roles. Muhammed Ali was one of the world’s leading sports personalities, despite it being difficult for black men to rise up the rank in a white-dominated sports industry.
These potent symbols of American Blackness are all iconic. Less well known is the broader context that, for a few optimistic years in the late-1960s, saw activists attempt to use positive thinking as a potent anti-racist weapon. This project was only partially successful but it beckons us to consider the complex relations between psychological wellbeing and political activism.
Positive Thinking as a Weapon
In the 1960s, Black activists weaponised positive thinking as a mode of activism, projecting a confident self-image rooted in pride and oozing self-esteem. In 1967, Stokeley Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, in their Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, called for a new consciousness no longer based around shame, one which might rescue Black people from white cultural terrorism. They drew psychological ideas from French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist and Marxist political philosopher Frantz Fanon, and particularly his framing of systemic racism as a psychological (rather than solely political or socio-economic) experience and dilemma. Carmichael and Hamilton never precisely outlined ways to build positive self-esteem– after all, they had not written a self-help book per se – but rather called for a rejection of white culture by adopting African names, clothes, rituals and sensibilities. The basic message was powerful: developing a positive self-image was an essential building block of collective liberation (Carmichael and Hamilton, 1967).
Martin Luther King, in his book, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community (1967, 44), similarly argued that
“…psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery…The Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abnegation and say to himself and the world: “I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honour. I have a rich and noble history””.
Across the nation, African Americans rethought their physical appearance. Hair was crucially important.Putting on display natural Black hair – the Afro – was a symbolic embracement of African heritage, rejecting whiteness and emphasising the value of a black aesthetic. Hair was, I would argue, surprisingly politicised. As Malcolm X (1965) wrote “I don’t see how on earth a Black woman with any race pride could walk down the street with any Black man wearing a conk – the emblem of his shame that he is Black.” The many stars of Black music, such as James Brown, raised the public visibility of this new self-image by replacing respectable conks, suits and dresses with afros complemented by African fashion such as dashikis, caftans and Kente cloth (Perry 2004, 4). Blues music seemed too reminiscent of a past era of hardship and sadness, so jazz, soul and funk became the chosen soundtrack for Black liberation. (Jones 1963; Keil 1966).
Black Power even had its own expert psychologist: Alvin Poussaint. As a psychologist, Poussaint felt convinced that self-help was crucial for effective political activism. He insisted that Black people had been taught deliberately to despise their “kinky hair, broad nose and thick lips,” finding psychological comfort in hair straighteners and bleaching cream. Poussaint felt deeply enthralled by Black Power’s advocacy of a more positive self-image to tackle white racism and ‘negro self-hatred’ (Poussaint 1968, 106-9). Of course, in the late-1960s, white hippies were simultaneously, and quite self-indulgently, professing that positive thinking (“Love is all you need”) might change the world. In contrast, Black activists engaged with psychological concepts to tackle more pressing, urgent matters affecting their daily lives.
“Negro Inferiority”
The positive thinkers were rallying against long-standing accusations of Black people’s psychological inferiority. In the twentieth century, self-esteem, inferiority complexes and positive psychologies were all quite new ideas (Miller 2024, chapter two). Psychology itself had only emerged as a distinctive field around the start of the twentieth century (e.g. Gaztambide 2019). Since then, psychologists had depicted Black Americans as chronic sufferers of inferiority complexes (e.g. Wesley 1940).
In some ways, negative depictions of Black psychological suffering developed by the expert class provided useful anti-racist propaganda for some activists, but the imagery was far from flattering. By the mid-1960s, it seemed clear that these images did not provide a helpful basis for grassroots activism. Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey’s influential book, The Mark of Oppression: A Psychosocial Study of the American Negro (1951), although sympathetic, offered depressing perspectives on deep-rooted Black self-hatred. Similarly, Black psychologists Kenneth B. and Mamie Clark famously asked a mixed group of children if they would rather play with white or brown skinned dolls. Most Black children chose the white doll, thinking it looked nicer, as did the white children. Low self-esteem was the problem here, concluded the Clarks, and the research featured prominently in debates on school segregation (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 1954).
Victimhood is useful only for a certain while, and a time always comes for active defiance. Against this backdrop, advocates of Black Power seized opportunities to apply positive psychology by projecting Black self-confidence, pride and self-esteem. Simple self-help strategies, such as expressing, and preferably also truly feeling, self-esteem and pride, or changing one’s image, were among these subtle, but incendiary, acts that could be embraced by Black communities from grassroots to leadership level.
The Persistence of Low Self-Esteem
Activists such as Carmichael, Hamilton and Malcolm X were not entirely unsuccessful. They fostered self-esteem across oppressed communities, and developed ideas such as Black pride that were truly culturally influential. They showed that therapy could be politically transformative. Ultimately though, the push for Black pride, esteem and respect was fleetingly momentary. Nonetheless, as Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us, we should not evaluate the work of social movements by whether or not they succeeded, but instead recognise and explore the meanings of the ideas, visions and dreams that inspired Black people historically to struggle for change (Kelley, 2002).
By the 1970s, “Black is beautiful” was undoubtedly a more common view than it once had been. Gone were the endless studies of Black inferiority complexes with their overly grim depictions. Nonetheless, as the twenty-first century began, American author and activist, bell hooks still lamented that: “crippling low self-esteem has reached epidemic proportions in our lives” thanks largely to white supremacism and self-sabotaging Black emotions. The manifestations included Black people living in a state of chronic anxiety, fear, powerlessness and shame. Offering mental health-based solutions reminiscent of the 1960s, hooks urged Black people to work on their emotional well-being and self-respect (hooks 2002, xii). When she spoke to her peers, the generation of baby boomers for whom 1960s radical politics held such promise, they disclosed feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, shame, guilt, self-loathing and self-distrust (hooks 2002, x).
Boosting one’s self-esteem undoubtedly empowered many activists but proved unsuitable as a basis for long-term socio-political change. The forces of racism, capitalism, modernity, consumerism, social injustice, socio-economic inequality all remained in place. The ongoing persistence of material and structural conditions ultimately meant that psychological practices were never going to be enough. No matter how good or bad one might feel about oneself, the ‘system’ remained firmly intact. Ideas such as mindfulness, positive thinking and self-care should never be over-relied upon. We currently live in a fraught era of renewed race riots and tensions, and also a time when activists are once again engaging with ideas of a “psychology of liberation” (e.g. Whytt and Ampadu 2022). Liberation psychologists initially including Spanish-born Jesuit priest and social psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994) from the 1970s and, more recently, by psychologists including Lillian Comas-Díaz and Edil Torres Rivera (2020), have challenged traditional Western‑based psychology by offering an emancipatory approach to tackling oppression. Psychology is often accused of being far too individualistic and self-absorbed, but liberation psychologists beckon us to consider broader issues such as discrimination, inequality, intersectionality, cultural identity and promoting social change.
Can the history of self-help and psychology offer insight into the strategies that activists might pursue? At a time when self-care and resilience are being upheld as radical acts of resistance against a fundamentally racist society, histories of ideas such as self-esteem can illuminate potentially avenues while also highlighting the limitations of individualistic psychological approaches which risk acting as a band-aid rather than solution for problems stemming from deep-rooted structural inequalities.
About the author
Ian Miller is a medical historian based at School of History, Ulster University, who has authored eight books. This article draws from Self-Esteem: An American History, published with Polity Press in 2024. He can be found on X @Ianmillerhistor
References
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