The Six Principles of the Black Perspective: Lived Experience Wisdom and Truth

Earlier this month, I wrote that MLK Day cannot be contained in one day. 

Similarly, although Black History Month offers much-deserved positive attention to Black speakers, scholars, and artists during the month of February, Black history cannot be contained in one month. We need it daily, in every history book, in children’s books, in visuals, media, research, service practices, and policy.

We need history, her story, and their stories to be told by people with lived experience. Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian, LGBTQIA2S+, and women’s herstories have primarily been told by white male historians. How does that impact the telling of the stories? 

Here’s an example. My brother once gave his students a history assignment. He asked each student to list three major events in their lives, and submit the list anonymously. He then distributed the lists to different students, and asked each student to write the history of another student based on the three life events they listed. After the classmates wrote one another's “histories,” they shared them with the person who made the list. In every instance, the person with lived experience responded, “No, no, no, that’s not at all what happened in my life!” 

We don’t know what we don’t know 

when we don’t have the same lived experience, culture, or language. 

The mis- and disinformation that the students witnessed also occurs when white historians try to write histories of people with whom they share no lived experiences. If the historian assumes a position of power or superiority, they are prone to exert that bias in their telling of history. As soon as one person or cultural group claims power, they set up a hierarchy that automatically disempowers another group. In history telling, the “otherized group” of people is often dehumanized as less intelligent, less hardworking…, less than, in general.

Historians who impose their singular perspective on defining people and events outside of their lived experience will inevitably create mistakes and misinform. Any history or herstory is incomplete without people from each culture contributing their lived experiences, studies, and documentation of the culture they know best. We can’t weave our historical rug when we’re missing most of the threads needed to hold it together. Then, we're also missing opportunities to be inspired by the cultural wisdom, innovations, arts, earth care, human care, and resourcefulness of our neighbors and global siblings–to create connections that help us learn, grow, and remain curious and open.

In January, I made the bold, brave, and humbling move to enroll in a Master’s of Social Work degree at Howard University. Howard has a fabulous and rigorous social work program that centers social justice. Howard faculty teach from The Black Perspective: Our Guiding Philosophy, a positive, inclusive, affirmation- and strengths-based perspective. This perspective centers the experience of people who have been oppressed, of people whose lived experience, true stories and identities have been left out of the history books.  

The six principles mirror social justice access, inclusion, and equity that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others who followed him in the quest for justice advocated, including Dr. Inabel Burns Lindsay, the Founding Dean of Howard’s School of Social Work. 

The six principles of The Black Perspective are positive guides toward treating people with respect, affirming them for who they are, and including everyone in the stories told and services provided.

* Listen to people and support them instead of judging them.

* See people from their strengths instead of assuming deficits. 

This treatment represents ethical, compassionate standards for social workers. This perspective is also essential for healthy family dynamics, friendships, work relationships, policy making, political discourse, and international relations.

Illustration based on the Howard University School of Social Work's Black Perspective Principles. Illustration: Yurani Cubillos

1. Affirmation: Affirm the strengths and lived experience of all people. Rather than looking at people as problems or blaming people for the poverty they suffer (as happens with many legal policies and law enforcement practices), look at systemic root causes and environmental factors to help us understand the challenges people face. Name Black, Native, Latine, Asian, LGBTQIA2S+, and diversely-abled pioneers of social equity and celebrate their contributions to communities, social programs, and society at large. Uplift rather than tear down.

2. Strengths: See strengths and goodness in others as a positive response and intervention to ongoing oppression. Instead of layering oppression upon oppression or making false assumptions, center people’s strengths and goodness. Key to seeing people's strengths is listening to them open-heartedly, without judgment. Seeing people’s strengths helps enhance social and economic justice. Isn’t this how we each wish to be seen by others?

3. Diversity: Celebrate diversity and highlight and celebrate differences among people within the same culture. Stereotyping or creating universal characteristics for an entire culture is harmful, disrespectful, and intolerable. Different people have different strengths and needs. We can only respond effectively to the needs if we recognize the differences in needs and relate them to policy and practice. This is another reason why it is so important for people with lived experience to write their herstories, their stories, and histories, to perform unbiased research, and to create solutions from a deep understanding of the issues.

4. Vivification and Inclusion: Prioritize naming and emulating the many global majority pioneers whose names are left out of the western Eurocentric history books. The Black Perspective is vibrant and dynamic, not stagnant. Through this perspective, we embrace and name contributions and address challenges of diverse people.

5. Social Justice: Center challenges that oppressed and underserved populations experience and study solutions and ideas that stem from people of the global majority who have lived experiences with those challenges. Work to achieve and sustain equity and freedom from oppression.

6. Internationalization. Global majority, LGBTQIA2S+, and women-identifying people have historically been denied the same level of social services, health care provision and research that was devoted to white men. With internationalization, we center populations that were traditionally excluded, including refugees, and people from Africa and the Caribbean and work to develop research studies and culturally-sensitive practices to provide services. Study organizational and community processes from local to international levels. 

As I work with Howard University professors and colleagues to apply the six life-changing principles of The Black Perspective, I witness compassionate people who see goodness and strengths in each person, and who identify and work to change the systemic and environmental factors that obstruct their journey to freedom. I see people creating a kind, supportive, and uplifting world–the world they want to live in; the world they want for their generations that follow.

Seeing people through the lens of strengths, affirmation, social justice, and compassion is embarking on the path to equity, peace, and a world in which all can thrive. I invite you to practice the six principles of The Black Perspective and participate in creating that world.

FAQs

1. How do the six principles of The Black Perspective differ from previous perspectives about people of the global majority?

   Within the U. S.'s capitalistic priorities, people of the global majority, immigrants, and refugees are often blamed for their experiences with poverty or for being forced to migrate. This dualistic lens of esteeming wealthy as good, hard-working, and deserving of privileges and denouncing those who suffer poverty and oppression as bad, not hard-working, and undeserving of basic services is a biased and short-sighted view. Systemic poverty among African Americans stems from the long tentacles of human rights violations during enslavement, and subsequent policies and practices that prevented African Americans from owning land, buying homes, voting, receiving equitable education, employment, and health care. These systemic injustices were passed down generationally, causing centuries of poverty and millions of underserved people.

   In contrast, The Black Perspective principles show respect to all people, and focus on addressing the inequities that oppressed people experience caused by systemic environmental injustices forced upon them.

   * Instead of seeing deficits, see strengths.

   * Instead of tearing down, build up and affirm people.

   * Instead of creating social hierarchies, celebrate diversity and differences among cultures.

   * Rather than excluding some from services and rights, include all.

   * Instead of favoring the wealthy and ignoring those who struggle, advocate for equitable services and opportunities for everyone.

   * Instead of prioritizing people of European ancestry and neglecting or discriminating against global majority populations, include all people, voices, cultures, and contributions.

   
   

2. How does The Black Perspective differ from race hierarchies and capitalism?

   Rather than increasing the wealth gap and viewing individuals who suffer poverty from a biased deficit perspective, The Black Perspective invites us to see and affirm strengths in each person and to identify and address the environmental factors that create obstacles to their ability to thrive. The current dominant, destructive culture of blaming and shaming stems from fear and breeds more fear. This path only leads to more blame and shame, otherizing and dehumanizing. The Black Perspective principles foster the skills to create a kind, supportive, and uplifting world, and empower people to build the just and affirming world where all can thrive.

   
   

3. If I'm not Black, do The Black Perspective principles still apply to me?

   Absolutely. The Black Perspective is inclusive and welcoming of all people. The Black Perspective principles positively impact everyone's personal and professional relationships. These principles offer an inclusive and lived-experience understanding for policy making, political discourse, and for forging alliances from the local level to international relations. The Black Perspective principles present a roadmap to foster local-to-global peace, equity, and justice.