MENTAL SLAVES

Although Britain may have continued to maintain an indirect economic influence through multinational corporations on its former colonies, the direct effects of British’s neocolonial socio-political and political ideologies have diminished significantly over the years. However, the West in general maintains an indirect form of domination over all developing African countries through means such as loans from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This form of neocolonialism is done through foreign aids or foreign direct investments where strict or severe financial conditionalities are imposed. Such conditionality often renders the neocolonial state subservient to the economic and sometimes political will of the foreign donor.



Beyond the Brazilian context, whiteness is mainly captured by the notion of privilege. According to Schucman , Cardoso, , Jensen , Ware , Bento and Carone , and Smith it is a position where subjects with white appearance and European origin acquire symbolic and material privileges when they are in relation to non-Whites or Blacks. Also, this privilege is maintained by invisibility strategies; strategies that hide the socio-historical construction of whiteness and impose it as a universal model of humanity, such as the following rationale.



From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909, offers primary source materials relating to a variety of historic events from the nineteenth century. Speeches, essays, letters, and other correspondence provide different perspectives on slavery, African colonization, Reconstruction, and the education of African Americans. Additional materials provide information about the political debates of legislation relating to slavery in the United States and its territories, such as the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850.

Psychology, like all other disciplines and human endeavors, has emerged, developed, and today operates in economic, political, social, and cultural contexts. Neglect of these contexts by establishment psychologists—and their role in oppression generally and European colonialism particularly—has been one of the hidden and not often recognized dangers of a discipline that claims to specialize in the science of the mind and behavior.i Decolonizing psychological science cannot therefore proceed unless we first understand the history of colonialism—the precedents instigating it, its underlying motivations, the transformations it has undergone, and the consequences that followed. I review in this article not only the history of colonialism, but also how establishment psychology continually maintained symbiotic and mutually supportive relations with colonialism. I first highlight the origin and early stages of colonialism, before focusing later on its contemporary form that I call metacolonialism because it shows that colonialism did not end; on the contrary, colonialism in its metacolonial form continues to influence the thought, behavior, and being of colonized peoples even more than did earlier forms of colonialism. I conclude with proposals for decolonizing psychology.

Beneath this strategy runs a kind of naturalization of the white racial superiority that gives an impression that people appearing white are naturally more beautiful, more intelligent, more human and "should" serve as a model for others. Those on the margin or outside of this model, like Africans and Indigenous, live in a subjective state of "lack" of something, lack of whiteness (Bento & Carone, 2002; Nogueira, 2008; Souza, 1983).