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Deconstructing Western Social Science

The nature of the white barbarian Eurocentric model and system my kind has been subjected to for many years:

Centering Human Liberation in Social Science Research

Notes from Na’im Akbar

Harrison’s Corner

Jun 25, 2025

The radicalism of the 1960s and 70s was not confined to the streets. Within the ivory tower of academia, a new generation of scholars was challenging the basic assumptions of their respective fields. One school of thought that emerged during this time is now known as the Africentric (or more commonly, Afrocentric) school. Building on the legacy of thinkers like Edward Wilmot Blyden and Marcus Garvey, it centers the people of the African continent (and their descendants in the West) in understanding humanity, material reality, and the unknown.

Dr. Na’im Akbar, former president of the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi), is a foundational theorist of the Africentric school. His interventions in studying mental health, education, and issues of Black manhood have inspired generations of Black psychologists. Dr. Akbar also had much to say about the research methods used in the social sciences.

We will explore two of his essays on that topic:

his 1989 paper “Paradigms of African American Research”1 and 1984’s “Africentric Social Sciences for Human Liberation.” Both deal with critiquing the Western paradigm of social science research and how to build a viable alternative.

Even the Rat Was White’:

Deconstructing Western Social Science

Middle class. Male. Caucasian. These are the characteristics of the “normative” social science research subject in the West (North America and Western Europe, primarily). From psychology to anthropology to economics, social scientists study these individuals to gain their insight. All others (non-white, non-male, poor) are deemed “deficient” and “pathological” by contrast. This dynamic is maintained by treating the social sciences as “objective” and value-free. Dr. Akbar begins both essays by drawing attention to the implicit acceptance of the assumptions in the Western research paradigm. But what is a paradigm? In “Paradigms of African American Research,” Dr. Akbar defines it as:

“…the shared conception of what is possible, the boundaries of acceptable inquiry, and the limiting cases. Within science a paradigm allows certain stability in models, methods, and modalities of knowledge, but at the price of certain insensitivity to new input.”