1. Para-Apartheid and Mental Health
Framework for Empowerment

2. Learning Objective
Understand major models for Black mobilization/empowerment
Interrogate major models for Black mobilization/empowerment
Recognize limitations of counseling therapy
Understand potential for the Ujamaa Circle Therapy Model for community success.

3. Street Corner Model Frantz Fanon—Lumpen Proletariate
Identifies the disenfranchised and unemployed as the most revolutionary group of people
Attempts to direct angst toward community empowerment

4. The colonial model
Recognizes Blacks as culturally and economically oppressed
Controlled by police, welfare and educational institutions
Recognizes forms of oppression and attempts strategy at undermining and minimizing the impact

5. Pathological model
Black individualism is seen as preventing group mobilization
Pathological practices are perceived as inhibiting group success
Provides a social service approach to community improvement

6. Para-Apartheid model Places Blacks as working within the working class
Recognizes their economic station as integral to economic interests
Utilizes the success of union organizing as a model for future success.

7. African Centered Family Therapy
Research on the therapy for Black families has focused on:
Cross-cultural communication that does not center the Black experience
Blacks as the exotic other
Has universalized Eurocentric cultural paradigms
Has viewed Black life as pathological

8. Maafa: The Great Destruction and Family Healing
Maafa: describes the horror of the invasion and colonization of Africa
Explains conditions of disorganization, disunity, self-hatred, and alienation
Provides context to therapy by recognizing the structural conditions that frame the Black lived experience

9. Maafa Experience Not just about the past Continued oppression
Global capitalism
Situates the psychospiritual being

10. Therapist Role Decolonize the spirits and minds of the oppressed
Reclaim African values and world views
Find support from within
Achieve harmony and balance with each other

11. Role cont. Help Black families to be reconciled back to the community
Reconnect around intentional community
Engage in the potential for creating a dialectical relationship between family healing and institution building

12. Therapist must: Engage Cultural pain
Explore personal and collective past
Understand the boundary that divides the spiritual and material world
Consider the importance of remembering African ancestors

13. Ujamaa Circle Process Attempts to establish a sense of connectedness
Utilizes structured dialogs
Attempts to uncover knowledge about psycho-social subjects
Positions people to collectively solve the learning problems

14. Ujamaa Circle Process Therapist is
Engaged listener
Open to the spiritual affinities of the family clients
Able to have empathy
Nonjudgmental
Able to be self-reflective

15. Ujamaa Circle Process Therapist is:
Able to make critical connections between ideas of individual family members
Comfortable with ambiguity and diversity
Is not afraid to ask questions derived from observations
Open to learning from clients even before they attempt to teach

16. Archetypal Personas of the Therapist
Diviner
Trickster
Elder
Priest

17. Central Organizing Theme and Cultural Value
Psychosocial Matrix of culturally determined behaviors
Theme—ideologies that allow cultural institutions to maintain value
Value—Principles, desires, or beliefs that a community collectively imbues with meaning
Ex: resistant/resilience is given context and meaning by a motivating cultural value for self-determination

18. Culturally Neurotic Behavior
Doing what is normal in an abnormal situation
Self-destructive behavior
Continuity despite ineffectiveness
Addicted to crisis
Emotional flatness

19. Personal alienation Feeling of estrangement
Questioning the meaning of existence in relationship to people and institutions around them
Feeling of powerlessness to make any difference in one’s own world
Sense of having no purpose, power or intimate relationship that give one’s life definition

20. Recognition of resistant behaviors:
Resigned to fatalism
Non-compliance
Oppositional logic
Compliance to the letter

21. Recognition of resistant behaviors cont.:
Rehearsed challenge
Emotional detachment
Stiff-necked independence
Inferred potential violence

22. Interventions
Therapist works to disrupt the a sense of security with past and continued oppressive conditions
Humor
Challenging the logic of neurotic behavior
Direct resilience behavior at a productive objective