What Have We Been Doing? (Black School Psychologists and the Desegregation Issue)

Abstract

They also serve who only stand and wait' appears to be the maxim of school psychologists in regards to their involvement in the racial desegregation movement. School psychology has been waiting for the governing agencies of education to act, and action in both areas has been minimal. Although some school systems have attempted to comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and desegregate their schools, many more school systems have been practicing deception. The strategies of evasion at the local levels are innumerable. A search of psychological, sociological, and educational abstracts revealed that not only have the school psychologists been standing around waiting for the Black child to come to their school, they have failed to investigate the effects of desegregation on students and school personnel when the black child is present. While this writer feels justified in castigating school psychologists (myself included) for their lack of involvement in desegregation, the castigation cannot be generalized to all psychologists. Social, clinical, and child psychologists, as well as educational psychologists from university settings, have been involved in desegregation and all that it entails. The worth of some of their work is questioned and much of it is interpreted loosely because, as too often happens, the beliefs of psychologists are expounded upon before they have been subjected to scientific proof. Black psychologists such as Clark2 and Johnson3 feel that some of the theories that the white psychologists have intro