Delegitimizing protest: Psychology's omissions and commissions

Abstract Psychological research has failed to take accountability for the ways it has aligned with State interests, at the expense of solidarity with Black people protesting the criminal legal system and pursuing liberation in the U.S. Through a case study analysis of six psychological research articles, ranging from 1968 to 2022, this paper tracks evidence of psychology's alignment with the State's interests. Evidence emerges in clinical disease(s) assigned to enslaved and incarcerated Black people (drapetomania, protest psychosis) and in empirical assumptions and (il)logics binding research methods and analyses. While theoretical and methodological frameworks, language (“patients,” “rioters,” “ghetto residents,” “minority group members”) and levels of analysis (psyche, personality, social, community, identity, movement) evolve over time and across subdisciplines, racialized carceral ideologies persist across psychological research approaches. By tracing carceral footprints across this vast psychological literature, this analysis reveals how traditional empirical research weaponized pathologizing and criminalizing accounts to delegitimize Black protests of State violence from the Civil Rights Movement to the Movement for Black Lives and beyond.