Free Paper Sample on Psychology: African American Psychology

Marjorie’s experiences affected how I think about the relationship between Africans and African Americans. Marjorie cannot fit in either community, whether it is in Ghana, where her heritage lies, or the United States, her home. She displays some level of confirmation bias when it comes to dealing with her identity. Marjorie is an American as much as she is an African, but she keeps looking for reasons why she is not one or the other. She has strong ties to Ghana, where her grandmother lives, but she does not consider it enough to make her African. Her parents are immigrants, and that should be enough reason for her to feel like an African. However, she also neglects that she is American by birth and still qualifies as an American despite her African roots. I think she should not struggle to belong to one, to the exclusion of the other. She should reconcile both identities.

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Marjorie is also displaying what can be known as the fundamental attribution error. She takes note of how people respond to her but fails to take note of their situational factors. Marjorie more often than not failed to realize that some of the people’s reactions were created by dispositional factors. For example, the boy calling her out about tours did not care whether she was Ghanaian or not. All he cared about was her American background, which makes a potential customer for the boy.

At the same time, I feel sorry for Marjorie because she is a victim of discrimination and racism. I am aware of the cultural aspects that make it hard for her to connect to people, but there are some instances where she was subjected to clear racism. Instances like Graham’s father, forcing him to end the relationship with Marjorie. Marjorie’s path seems to set her on a collision course with Marcus. Nevertheless, while the two characters seem to have similar experiences, the differences captured my attention.

I noticed the difference between Marjorie's and Marcus’ responses to the tour guide. Marjorie tended to be hesitant towards the tour guides and even tried to avoid them. As for Marcus, he was more receptive to the idea and the individual and did not feel threatened. While both characters seem to be struggling with achieving self-actualization in their respective lives, Marjorie displayed behavioral psychology where she had been conditioned to perceive the locals as threats even though she wanted to be one of them. I found it quite ironic that she tried to fit in, in Ghana while at the same time displaying fear towards one of the locals.

I also noted that Marcus struggles to come to terms with the reality of his past and heritage. The truth surrounding racism, slavery, and oppression against black people is that he is having a hard time reconciling. I realized that it was not a case of trying to deny or reject one’s heritage, but his attempt to reconcile how humans can do such things to one another and on a grand scale. His was a case of the false consensus effect. He overestimates the commonness of his attitudes because he was not the first person to look into the topic, and he certainly would not be the last. The topic has been studied and thought about by other people, or at least part of it. I hold the opinion that whatever he was going to delve into, he had overthinking it.

It realized that both characters had helped each other in finding self-actualization. Self-actualization sits at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and usually takes a long time to achieve. Some of the two characters’ challenges were as a result of their inability to meet that need. Marcus, with the stalemate in his research and Marjorie staying away from Ghana and letting her African identity erode. In the end, I found the book to be quite informative, especially in regard to the struggles that immigrants and their descendants go through while trying to find their identity.