Abstract
The life experience of many economically deprived black Americans is largely a direct result of racial discrimination and prejudice, abject poverty, and educational, economic, social, and political control in America (Collier, 1977; Harwood, 1969). Under these conditions, it is not surprising that many experience some form of depression, hopelessness, and helplessness (Kerr, 1972; McCord, 1969). The tendency in America has been to invoke arguments of innate intellectual inferiority (Jensen, 1969) or inferior personality structure as an explanation for these behaviors (e.g., Kardiner & Ovesey, 1962). A more parsimonious and empirically testable model of hopelessness and helplessness is provided by the learned helplessness theory (Seligman, 1975, 1978). The purpose of this chapter is to present an overview of the learned helplessness model, describe how it can be used to account for numerous problems confronting economically deprived black Americans, and discuss behavior change procedures which emanate from the model. In addition, a brief discussion of depression which sometimes develops from feelings of chronic helplessness will be included. A word of caution is needed at this juncture. The discussion of learned helplessness in this chapter is not meant to imply that all black Americans suffer from this problem.
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© 1982 Plenum Press, New York
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Green, L. (1982). A Learned Helplessness Analysis of Problems Confronting The Black Community. In: Turner, S.M., Jones, R.T. (eds) Behavior Modification in Black Populations. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4100-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4100-0_5
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