Kobi Kambon

Early life

Kobi Kazembe Kambon (a.k.a. Joseph A. Baldwin) was born in Jasper, Alabama November 29, 1943. His mother, Mable E. Guyton- Baldwin was a School Teacher and Community-civic leader who died in 1996 at the age of 92. His father, Andrew Baldwin Sr., was first a coal miner and then a Baptist Minister who died in 1969 at the age of 76. Kambon is the 9th of 10 children, with four sisters and five brothers.

He attended Walker County Training School for jr. high school and high school, and attended Wilson Jr. College in Chicago. Kambon was briefly drafted in the Army from 1965 to 1957.

Dr. Kambon later transferred to DePaul University in Chicago in 1969, where he received his bachelor's degree in Psychology. He then went on to acquire a Masters of Arts degree in Personality-Abnormal Psychology from Roosevelt University (1971), and a Ph.D. in Personality and Social Psychology from the University of Colorado in Boulder (1975).

Academic career

Dr. Kobi Kambon is a retired professor of Psychology from the Psychology Department at Florida A&M University. During his 30-year career at Florida A&M, Kambon held the role of Department Chair from 1985 to 1997, and also served as Coordinator of the Community Psychology Graduate Program. Kambon’s emphasis on Africentric views shifted the Psychology Department as a whole towards a more African centered perspective, and Kambon is credited with inspiring a dramatic increase in Psychology graduates of African descent from Florida A&M, making it one of the highest producing departments in the country in that respect.

Dr. Kambon has written, developed and contributed to well over 60 scholarly publications, five of which are books. He is the author of two text books, titled African/Black Psychology in the American Context (1998) and The African Personality in America (1992), that have been used and praised by scholars and students at institutions across the country. Kambon has also developed various instruments and measures to assess Black personality and mental health variables.

African (Black) Psychology: Issues and Synthesis

In his widely cited article African (Black) Psychology: Issues and Synthesis, Kobi Kambon provides a general overview of his Africentric approach to studying the psychology of Black Americans. He argues that while most Black psychologists recognize the need for a Black psychology, some fail to consider that it might be an undertaking that is entirely separable from Western Psychology. Dr. Kambon suggests that to study Black psychology as contained within Western Psychology is to ignore African cultural and philosophical antecedents, thereby framing modern Black psychology as a set of mere reactions to Western culture and oppression. Kambon calls much of this work “Western psychology in blackface”, referring to the psychologists involved as conceptually incarcerated thinkers, stuck within a Eurocentric framework of psychology.

Kambon insists that it is reasonable to conceptualize an African (Black) Psychology as existing independently of Western Psychology based on the fact that African cultures existed, and even preceded Western cultures. Race, he argues, “constitutes the principal binding condition underlying the evolution of definitional systems which in their most basic fundamental nature have a ‘racial component’.” Thus, African psychologies initially evolved within African definitional systems. A problem emerges, however, when an alien definitional system, or worldview, is foisted upon a people for whom the worldview was not designed, and within which they are negatively viewed.

This, Kambon argues, is the context in which Black individuals are expected to exist and thrive, despite the fact that a European reality structure is a definitional system that does not give legitimacy to African social realities. Given this cultural and psychological “incarceration”, Kambon advocates for a Black psychology that allows African Americans to consciously resist European reality structures in favor of an African worldview that affirms their existence, thereby restoring what Kambon calls “Africanity” to its centrality in the Natural Order.

Mental Health of African Americans

In much of his work, Kobi Kambon evaluates African American mental health issues in terms of an Africentric approach to African (Black) psychology. In his article African Self Consciousness and the Mental Health of African Americans he touches on the prevalence of mental health disorders in African American populations, and suggests that Western oppressive forces are extremely potent in their effects on African American psychology. Thus, Kambon frames mental health concerns of African Americans as distortions of the African personality from its natural condition.

In order to explain such distortions of Black personalities, Kambon coins the terms African self-extension orientation and African self-consciousness. The African self-extension orientation is defined by Kambon as the biogenetic basis for African personalities, which Kambon argues to be innately distinct from European personalities. The ultimate expression of the African self-extension orientation is mediated by what Kambon terms African self-consciousness, which is under conscious regulation and is therefore sensitive to environmental context. This is to say that the full expression of African personalities is contingent on the alignment of the African self-extension orientation with an appropriate African culture, or “African cosmology”. Any other reality structure, under Kambon’s model, will inevitably prevent African personalities from developing naturally.

Kambon refers to this process of distortion as a differentiation between the African self-extension orientation and African self-consciousness. Thus, differentiation yields basic disorder in the Black personality, which threatens the state of African American mental health in the United States.

Kambon proposes that interventions are warranted in alleviating the burden of mental health on African Americans. The suggested interventions should be aimed at reconciling African Self Consciousness with African self-extension orientation. Such interventions would provide African social and institutional structures that serve to support and reinforce African Self Consciousness, such as Africentric educational institutions, religious institutions, social activities and rituals.

Legacy

Kobi Kambon has had a tremendous influence on the field of African (Black) psychology, contributing much to conversations about how a Black psychology should be defined and studied in relation to White psychology and culture. Straying from what Jackson (1979) terms the reactive and inventive approaches to a study of Black people, Kambon chose to focus solely on the psychology of African Americans as something uniquely African, and therefore functionally independent from White Psychology. This framework empowers people of African descent to seek out and embrace African cultural histories and worldviews, which fundamentally oppose European worldviews and their associated psychologies, according to Kambon.

Kambon’s position on these issues is quite profound, in that it completely challenges the theoretical underpinnings of Western psychology, and calls into question its ability to say anything meaningful or useful about African (Black) psychology. An appreciation of Kambon’s arguments therefore points to a research approach that is entirely different from that taken up by Western Psychologists. Kambon has centered his research on this approach, and Black psychologists around the country have certainly been influenced by his Africentric model as well.

Other Scholarly Works