About AAWWH: History & Needed Change

The idea of an African American Wholistic Wellness Hub was conceived over a decade ago, by the senior staff of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life and Culture Inc.. It was actualized with the funding and completion of the African American Wholistic Wellness Hub Design Research and Planning Initiative (see Final Report, 2012).

The designing of the Hub research information gathering process included conducting: community focus groups/small group discussions, (n=14; surveys of best ideas and practices, (n=120); site visits to established Black owned and operated organizations throughout the country, (n=6); and commissioned thematic scholar/practitioner papers, (n=9).

Resulting in a major culturally congruent (African-centered) “paradigm shift”, the culminating vision captured from the African-American community was to have the African American Wholistic Wellness HUB Complex serve as a “living container” to preserve, comprehend, and actualize the core understandings and best practices of African American people with a focus on the restoration of wellness.

Standing on the Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Life and Culture, Inc., fifty (50) years of “Service through Science” to, by, and for Black people, the Hub is unapologetically, unashamedly and openly a Black organization/ agency that is non-discriminatory and will provide services to anyone and everyone.

For generations, African American communities have been misdiagnosed, over-surveilled, and pathologized within mental health, child welfare, education, criminal justice, and healthcare systems. Behavioral expressions rooted in cultural styles (e.g., communal communication, spiritual coping, expressive affect) are often misinterpreted as oppositional, aggressive, and/or maladaptive.

African American communities have experienced centuries of enslavement, racial terror, psychic terrorism, segregation, microaggressions, historical trauma, redlining, mass incarceration, and systemic exclusion. These are not peripheral historical facts; they are structurally embedded realities that shape contemporary health, education, economic opportunity, behavioral services/treatment and psychological well-being.

In Western psychology and social service systems, the dominant paradigm has historically centered Eurocentric norms as universal. Human functioning is measured against Western developmental models, individualism is privileged over communal identity, and pathology is often interpreted as individual dysfunction rather than structural and/or historical harm. Within this framework, African American life is frequently evaluated as deviant, deficient, or “at risk” relative to a white normative baseline.

Over a half century ago, (circa 1968) The Association of Black Psychologists (The ABPsi) charged the APA with condoning the White racist character of American society and failing to provide models and programs conducive to solving African American problems stemming from the oppressive effects of American white supremacy/racism. In 2021, the American Psychological Association (APA) formally apologized for its role in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism in psychology and in the broader U.S. society.

The Association of Black Psychologists, of which Dr. Wade Nobles was a co-founder did not accept the APA’s 2021 apology because the apology was viewed as inadequate in scope and depth and performative rather than transformative. The formal apology issued by the American Psychological Association acknowledged historical and systemic harm within psychology and related service systems. However, acknowledgment alone does not transform systems. Transformation requires institutional redesign.

African American communities often express mistrust toward agencies due to historical abuses (e.g., medical experimentation, discriminatory policing, inequitable child removal practices). When agencies operate within paradigms that replicate power hierarchies and cultural misunderstanding, engagement without a paradigm shift, agencies unintentionally perpetuate: overdiagnosis (e.g., conduct disorders, oppositional defiance); disproportionate disciplinary actions; criminalization of trauma responses; and deficit-focused narratives. For agencies working with African American communities, the APA’s acknowledgment raises important questions for County agencies. Are our assessment tools culturally validated beyond Euro-normative samples? Do our diagnostic categories reflect cultural difference or cultural bias? Are we interpreting trauma responses as pathology? Do we treat community knowledge as data or as anecdote? Is our leadership reflective of the populations we serve?

The establishment of the African American Wholistic Wellness Hub represents not merely a new program but a structural embodiment of paradigm shifting It moves beyond reforming existing agencies and instead re-centers African episteme, communal ontology, and culturally grounded healing as the organizing architecture of service delivery. Capacity enhancement and professional development represent a fundamental change in how reality is defined, interpret human behavior, organize knowledge, and determine what counts as “normal,” “healthy,” or “pathological.” It is a transformation of the underlying worldview, assumptions, language, and standards that guide assessment, intervention, research, and policy.

This paradigm shifting requires moving from that deficit-based, Euro-normative frame toward an African-centered, historically grounded, culturally congruent worldview, i.e., one that understands African American people not as broken versions of a Western ideal, but as carriers of distinct epistemologies, cosmologies, and communal traditions that shape identity, consciousness, resistance and wellness.