Woodson showed us what was kept from us. Akbar goes inside what was put there instead.

Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery is behavioral archaeology. Every pattern we've been told is a moral failure — the relationship to work, to property, to leadership, to family, to self-worth — Akbar traces each one back to a specific condition of chattel slavery. I kept having to stop reading because I kept finding myself in the pages.

I cover the Psychological Legacy of Slavery and Liberation from Mental Slavery sections of this book. I bring in my own story — corporate cycles, material acquisition mistaken for freedom, the I/O psychology textbook that erased enslaved Africans as the first American workforce, and a research question I was already sitting with in graduate school that this book gave me new language for.

The liberation section is where Akbar shifts from autopsy to strategy. It is not comfortable. And it ends with three words: let's get to work.

This is Arc I, Episode 5. We are still naming the distortion. Now we are learning its interior.

Keywords: Na'im Akbar, Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery, Black psychology, psychological legacy of slavery, internalized oppression, African American mental health, Black liberation, grafted leadership, pet-to-threat, colorism, Black family destruction, divide and conquer, knowledge of self, African-centered psychology, We Been Knew, Arc I

I finished The Miseducation of the Negro on the last day of Black History Month and the same day I completed Module 1 of my certification in African Black Psychology (CABP) through ABPsi. I did not plan that. And by the time you finish this episode, you will understand why I am telling you it landed the way it did.

These final chapters are Woodson's turn from diagnosis to prescription. After eighteen chapters of precise, painful evidence, he asks: what do we build instead? His answer is reconstruction from a completely different foundation. Built on self-knowledge. Built on Black genius. Built on the radicalism that rises from within because the outside was never coming.

ABPsi has been part of my world since early 2025 — I attended my first conference last July, where I had the extraordinary experience of meeting Baba Wade Nobles and Na'im Akbar. The CABP is what I registered for around Christmas. And Module One — which opened with the Kemetic seven-element model of the human being, the deep cultural structures of African peoples across the diaspora as the foundation of the science, and the transmission that if the ancestors are not lost, neither are we — landed on the same day I closed this book. That is not coincidence. That is Spirit.

In this episode I also work through Woodson's economic argument on imitation versus innovation, Dr. Linda James Myers on the nature of power, what I witnessed at a Black History Month fair, and the warmth and competence dynamic I lived as a vendor and as someone who had material access in a community navigating manufactured scarcity. Woodson was describing that psychology in 1933. It is still producing its outputs now.

This is Arc I, Episode 4. The Miseducation of the Negro is complete. We are naming the distortion with our own language now. And we have the institutions our ancestors built to hold us while we do.

Keywords: Carter G. Woodson, Miseducation of the Negro, ABPsi, Association of Black Psychologists, CABP certification, African Black psychology, Kemetic philosophy, seven elements holistic human model, Ka Ba Khaba Akhu Seb Putah Atmu, Sakhu, Wade Nobles, Jegna, Jegnaship, optimal psychology, Linda James Myers, APA walkout 1968, Black self-determination, imitation vs innovation, radicalism from within, Black political autonomy, Black History Month, Tree of Life, African worldview, mother-mind, diaspora, Arc I We Been Knew

I went into these chapters thinking I was reading history. I came out understanding I was reading a diagnostic report on the present.

Chapters 8 through 12 of The Miseducation of the Negro are where Woodson stops cataloguing the conditions and starts tracing the logic. The miseducation was not passive. It was targeted. Law schools for Black students were shut down at the exact moment that Black people most needed legal knowledge to protect their civil and political rights. The Constitution was removed from the textbooks of Black children — and then those same children, grown into adults, were asked to expound constitutional provisions in order to register to vote. Provisions, Woodson notes, that had baffled high courts. The trap was perfect and complete.

In this episode, I spend time with what that kind of deliberate exclusion does to a people across generations. Not just what it takes away, but what it installs in its place. The inability to imagine yourself in certain professions. The contempt for Black institutions. The willingness to be used as a political body without ever being brought into the room where decisions are made. The infighting for positions of symbolic honor with no actual power behind them.

I also spend time with Woodson's portrait of the misleader — the figure who is financed and publicized by the enemies of the community in order to redirect and contain it. He was writing about hirelings in churches and classrooms and political offices. I'm reading it in a moment when I can see the same logic running through celebrity culture, through organizational politics, through whoever gets the funding and the platform and the visibility in the name of our people's progress.

The part of this week's reading that I keep returning to is the distinction Woodson draws between leadership and service. Under leadership, he writes, we came into the ghetto. By service within the ranks, we may work our way out. The servant of the people is not on a high horse. The servant lives among the people, works with them, shares what they know without positioning it as exceptional. That framing has real consequences for how I'm thinking about my own work — at Safe Black Space, in the healing circles, in the writing I'm doing, in this very series.

Woodson also names something that I felt in my own body: the education he received, the education many of us have received in credentialed institutions, is only part of what is needed. The most nutritive education is the one you give yourself. That is what I am doing here. That is what We Been Knew is.

This is Arc I, Episode 3. We are still inside the distortion. But we are naming it.

Keywords: Carter G. Woodson, Miseducation of the Negro, Black professional exclusion, political education, Black voter suppression, Reconstruction, misleaders, DEI rollback, Black History Month, Black consciousness, self-education, Arc I We Been Knew, Black community service, internalized oppression, Black liberation, systemic racism, Black leadership critique

In Episode 2 of We Been Knew, I continue my reading of The Miseducation of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson (Chapters 4–7, pp. 23–54).

This episode centers on “education under outside control” and the psychological training embedded in atmosphere, hierarchy, and institutional design. Woodson’s critique moves beyond false history into something more structural: how authority, access, and social separation condition worldview long before we’re even aware we’re being shaped.

I connect Woodson’s observations to modern corporate dynamics, DEI initiatives constrained by executive comfort, and the way so many of us are taught to chase credentials as insulation rather than liberation. I sit with the difference between participation and sovereignty, and I reflect personally on proximity, separation, and the fracture between individual advancement and collective responsibility.

I also name internalized distortion—how fragmentation, competition, and distrust can replicate externally imposed hierarchy within Black communities themselves. Woodson’s warning about the educated elite leaving the masses stops being abstract and becomes a mirror.

This conversation isn’t about reforming a flawed system. It’s about recognizing when the foundation itself is distorted and asking what responsibility emerges once I can see it.

Keywords: Carter G. Woodson, miseducation, outside control, psychological conditioning, worldview formation, economic sovereignty, talented tenth, internalized oppression, proximity to power, DEI critique, structural hierarchy, community fragmentation, Afrocentric thought, sovereignty vs participation

For Arc I of my We Been Knew series, I chose to begin with The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson — the scholar who founded Negro History Week in 1926, which later became Black History Month. As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of that founding, it felt necessary to return to the source.

In this first episode of my We Been Knew series, I walk through Jarvis R. Givens’ introduction and Chapters 1–3, where Woodson lays out the real problem in Black education: not just lack of access, but the moral and ideological substance of what is taught. He critiques Reconstruction-era industrial training, the limits of classical education, the myth that labor efficiency equals liberation, and the deliberate erasure of African intellectual history.

As I read, I trace the throughline into my own life: elite schooling, corporate mobility without power, assimilation as survival, and the moment when the version of “success” I was taught collapsed.

Woodson names how miseducation conditions people to drift away from their own truth. A century later, the patterns are still recognizable.

If you’ve ever wondered why doing everything “right” still felt misaligned, this conversation might explain why.

Keywords: Carter G. Woodson, Black History Month 100th anniversary, The Mis-Education of the Negro, Black education, Reconstruction, industrial education, self-determination, psychological conditioning, sovereignty, corporate assimilation.

For years I’ve watched organizations applaud civility while avoiding the deeper questions:

* Whose comfort does this civility protect?

* What truths get silenced in the name of professionalism?

* And how much brilliance, honesty, and human potential get lost when authenticity is mistaken for disruption?

This presentation grew out of those questions and the research I completed for my M.S. in Applied Psychology at USC this past year and half, while living through……well….if you’re reading this, then you know what we have been living through.

It weaves together organizational science, Optimal Psychology, and the lived realities of Black professionals navigating spaces that ask us to perform belonging instead of experiencing it.

Honestly, my favorite part about this process has been that I got to have these much needed conversations and I think you’ll find the revelation at the 35-minute mark to be particularly affirming and powerful about us as a people.

Why This Matters Now

We are living in a moment when “diversity fatigue” and a return to blatant and unapologetic racism and erasure are real.

My research asked:

* How are Black professionals experiencing and responding to DEI retrenchment in the current political climate, and what strategies and values guide their decisions about belonging, authenticity, and career direction?

* How do Black employees assess the authenticity of their organization’s DEI efforts, and what factors indicate genuine commitment versus performative initiatives?

* How do changes in DEI policies and practices influence Black employees’ sense of belonging, psychological safety, and their decision to stay, leave, or advocate for change?

* What workplace characteristics and employer commitments attract Black professionals seeking environments that support their career values and long-term success?

The findings revealed something both sobering and liberating:

“Civility”, as it’s commonly performed, has become a management strategy. It allows organizations to appear progressive without changing power. Yet the same concept, re-examined through an Optimal lens, can become a tool for collective healing — if we are willing to tell the truth about what we’ve normalized.

A Few Takeaways

* Civility without conscience reinforces hierarchy; it is often a symptom of fear.

* Authenticity without structure can burn people out; courage must be resourced.

* Optimal alignment — between values, voice, and systems — is what turns culture change from aspiration into practice.

For Those Who Feel Seen by This

If this conversation resonates, I’d love for you to:

Reflect on what civility has meant in your own career or community.

Share this article with someone who curates or shapes culture where they work.

And if you’d like to bring this dialogue into your organization or learning space, you can connect with me.

When we reclaim our full voice, we stop surviving our workplaces and start transforming them.

Thank you for being part of this work.

Cheyennis Doom, M.S.

Consulting & Optimal Psychologist

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