Abstract: The focus of the current work is the long-held assumption that captive Africans exited slavery exhibiting a level of cultural and psychological backwardness that made adjustment to freedom problematic. This legacy of slavery trope is said to be a major factor causing contemporary black-on-black violence. As a counter narrative, extreme poverty, revealed from the perspective of black political economy covering the Great Depression to the present, is shown to provide a better platform from which to understand challenges faced by black people.

Bio: William E. Cross, Jr., PhD received his doctorate in social psychology from Princeton University and is the author of Shades of Black, an important book on black identity published by Temple University Press in 1991. Dr. Cross’s new book Black Identity Viewed from a Barber's Chair: Nigrescence and Eudaimonia (view publisher page; view book flyer) will be published by Temple University Press in June 2021. In 2017 Dr. Cross was accorded emeritus status by the University of Denver, where he held a joint appointment in Counseling Psychology and Higher Education. The first twenty years of his academic career were spent at the African Studies and Research Center, Cornell University. There followed appointments at Penn State, UMass-Amherst, and UNLV, and ten years with the Critical Psychology Program at the Graduate Center-CUNY, in New York City.