Interculturality and White Cultural Hegemony in South African Professional Psychology

This chapter argues that the occurrence of interculturality within South African professional psychology is largely governed by what I have termed elsewhere as white cultural hegemony. It explains that the dominance of the white cultural lifeworlds within professional psychology in South Africa creates an environment through which those who come to be Black in the world are alienated by the profession, resulting in what the South African political activist Steve Biko (1971/2017) called non-whites. Relying on Frantz Fanon’s concept of lactification, as the ways in which Blacks when encountering whiteness must be turned white, this chapter notes that the hegemonically white professional psychology space in its attempts to whiten Black people creates non-whites. Using the author’s own experiences as a student psychologist, this chapter illustrates how white cultural hegemony within professional psychology affects the ways interculturality occurs. In this way, this chapter’s contribution is not only towards illuminating the non-white status given to Blacks but also a critique of dominant forms of interculturality as it seeks to make invisible white cultural hegemony therefore, frustrating adequate interculturality.