From Negro to African American

Robert Scoby

University of Arizona

Rev. Elwood McDowell

From Negro to African American

A New Psychological Approach

This paper is dedicated and written for Elwood McDowell, a genius of immense originality whose ideas, scholarship, and deep intellect embody what is best in Afro-American Psychology

...The Negro's mind has been brought under the control of his oppressor...When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand or go younder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit... (Woodson, 1934). From the quote above it is apparent that all of what the African American has faced in the past and will continue in our future is all based on psychology. The psychology that is being referred to is of the suppressors which resulting in how African Americans viewed themselves. There goal was to create a "cultural bomb" and the effect of this cultural bomb was to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland (Woodson, 1937).

Names thus are meaningful. The meaning of a name, by which it connects to and objects it represents. That significance has to be established by the act of naming a thing, and has to be maintained by consistent use of that name. In other words, as part of our language, names have to elaborated, and this elaboration of their meaning is a fundamentally social activity (Wittgenstein, 1958). This very point has been the central concern of a new theory of meaning, the so-called causal theory of reference, developed first by Saul Kripke (1972, 1980) and Hilary Putnam (1975, 1983). In this approach meaning is not a product of individual mental activity, but instead the result of collective creation (Philogene, 1999). The sequence of different names used to identify