Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity

Amina Mama’s central question is not simply how racism distorts psychology, but how psychological knowledge helps make racial power appear natural—and what a different account of the self would require. She begins by tracing representations of Africans and Black people through colonial medicine, scientific psychology and theories of racial identity. Enslaved people were cast as fitted for enslavement and then pathologised when they resisted it; later accounts repeatedly made a supposedly damaged, unitary Black subject the object of diagnosis. These theories did not merely describe people. They helped organise institutions and public common sense around white supremacy.

Mama’s history is especially attentive to who disappears inside the category “the Black subject.” Colonial and mainstream psychology often treated Black women as an aside, while Black identity research took a masculine subject as universal. In a different but related move, white-centred theories of gender made white femininity stand for womanhood in general. The result is not just a missing group to be added to an existing model: the model itself is inadequate. Mama therefore puts feminist and postcolonial questions to psychology’s assumptions about the universal, rational, self-contained individual, and asks how social histories enter what disciplines call the mind.

Her alternative is “subjectivity”: not a hidden, stable identity, nor a blank individual passively shaped by society, but an unfinished process in which people move among positions made available by history, institutions, relationships and imagination. A person can absorb a dominant image, resist it, or inhabit contradictory positions at once. Mama develops this argument through recorded conversations with fourteen other Black women in Britain, in which she also participated as researcher, alongside historical and political analysis. Her method matters as much as her conclusion: she explains her own location in the research, treats participants’ accounts as situated knowledge rather than transparent access to an untouched truth, and admits that she retained responsibility for the final selection, interpretation and writing. It is dialogic work, but not fully co-authored or participant-controlled research.

The chapters on Black British life show why neither “damage” nor uncomplicated celebration is enough. Women describe the ways school, family, work, migration and the Black women’s movement changed how they understood themselves. In the extended account of Mona, a shift from colonial-integrationist ideas toward Black radical identification does not happen as a clean conversion: intimate relationships, classed and racialised expectations, and judgements about hair, dress and “authentic” Blackness shape what positions feel possible. Resistance can open room for self-definition, but a collective politics can also create new tests of who counts as properly Black. Mama’s case is not a universal portrait; it is a way to see social discourse and personal relationships working together in one historically specific life.

The chapter on Black femininity sharpens the argument. Mama rejects a model of “triple oppression” when it reduces Black women to accumulated injury or ultimate victimhood. Accounts of colourism, hair straightening and skin lightening show how racist standards of beauty can be enforced not only by white institutions but also through everyday relationships within Black communities. Yet these practices cannot be read as simple evidence that women wish to become white: they unfold amid a patriarchal demand to be desirable and a racial order that defines desirability unequally. Black feminist organising, poetry and cultural memory create other ways to imagine femininity, while the book remains alert to the risk that a positive collective identity may harden into a narrow, supposedly authentic essence.

That refusal of easy answers is the book’s lasting feminist value. Mama neither treats agency as freedom from structure nor reduces women to its effects. She asks how people improvise within unequal conditions, how personal consciousness resonates with collective movements, and how scholarship itself can reproduce the categories it claims to study. Her account also has a distinct historical and geographic frame: it grows from Black women’s political life in Britain and research conversations conducted around the early 1980s. It should not be used as a comprehensive account of all Black women, African societies or later generations. Some of its language and theoretical debates belong to 1995; readers may also question how its two broad discursive positions—colonial-integrationist and Black radical—capture lives that do not fit neatly between them, or how its selective participant material supports claims beyond this group.

Read today, Beyond the Masks is less a handbook of fixed identities than a methodological challenge: when psychology names a subject, whose history and whose power have shaped the name? It pairs well with Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought, which develops a distinct framework for Black feminist knowledge and power; the two are connected by questions of epistemic authority, not treated as interchangeable arguments. Mama’s particular contribution is to connect those questions to the making of psychological theory and to the relational, sometimes uncomfortable movement through which a self takes shape.