To cite this article:
Tumisang P. Sedumedi (25 Jun 2025): Reflexivity: A Constructive Dissection
of the Self as a Black South African Woman, Journal of Constructivist Psychology,
<span style="color: initial;"
DOI: 10.1080/10720537.2025.2523431
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10720537.2025.2523431
ABSTRACT
I construed issues of race and racism in a constellatory way before 2019. Shamefully, although I was aware that racism existed, I narrowed my perceptual field to construe racism as other Black people’s problems, which did not involve me. I failed to construe that some constructions of myself were shaped by how I construed Blacks in relation to Whites. I construed Black people’s painful stories of racism in democratic South Africa as a strategy to continue shaming White people.
In my narrowed field of perception, I construed myself to lack commonality with Blacks because I did not experience racial attacks until adulthood. However, reflectively, I construed that the underprivileged location where I grew up meant I was encountering the legacy of colonization and Apartheid. In this reflexive paper, I explore how I used constriction when desiring to be whitened.
I used personal construct techniques to examine the root of my desire to be a White person and my journey to become proud of who I am as a Black South African woman.
“The best one can ever expect from a theory is that it will enable him to see what he has never seen before.” (Kelly, 1970, p. 260)
Reflexivity
Reflexivity is essential in personal construct psychology (see Hennessy, 2009; Winter,
2009) because the psychologist or researcher cannot divorce himself/herself from the
constructs he/she uses to understand his/her clients or research participants (Oliver
& Landfield, 1962). It enables the researcher to become aware of his/her possible
influence on the research (Banister et al., 1994) and the impact of the research on
the sense of self. The researcher must be willing to self-construe from the viewpoint
of the theory used in the study and be cautious about the fallacies of reflexivity
(Hennessy, 2009). Therefore, researchers must ask themselves, “How do we know when
we are being reflexive?” (Hennessy, 2009, p. 222), which indicates that reflexivity
involves intentionality.
A reflexive researcher must be epistemologically vigilant (see Bourdieu, 2001/2004).
He/she must recognize how his/her perceptions and socio-cultural, academic, and
political knowledge might bias his/her analysis of the studied object (Deer, 2008). An
epistemic vigilant stance, in which the researcher objectifies himself/herself (Bourdieu
& Loȉc, 1992), is challenging because researchers, intellectuals, and psychologists are
skilled at objectifying others and not themselves (Bourdieu & Loȉc, 1992). Therefore,
as will be described in this paper, Tumisang’s1 objectification of herself was
anxiety-provoking, involving a lack of available constructs (Kelly, 1955), because the
process lay outside the range of convenience of her construct system.
She had to consciously switch from the pole she usually used to construe [that is, an objectifying subject] to the opposite pole [an objectified object], a process which Kelly (1969)referred to as slot-rattling. Tumisang’s anxiety emanated from the anticipation of exposing herself to the reader and her inability to anticipate what she would uncover,
discover, and reveal about herself. Her anxiety was escalated by her difficulty in
predicting how the reader would construe her after discovering her previous construing
of her skin color. Furthermore, Tumisang was uncertain whether she had the skills to
objectify herself to examine her meanings as a Black South African woman.
To guard against epistemocentrism, in which a particular epistemological knowledge
and its methods are considered valuable (see Bourdieu & Loȉc, 1992), Tumisang
employed various personal construct methods (i.e., self-characterization, the Perceiver
Element Grid, the Event Perceiver Grid, and Fixed Role Therapy) to explicate her
construing of her skin color.
The techniques enabled Tumisang to reflect on the instigating factors of her desire to be a White person, her construing and positioning of herself in relation to Whites, and proudly reconstruing her skin color. Moreover, she considered how socio-cultural
constructions and her lived experiences might have shaped her construction of race and racism. Therefore, in this reflexive paper, Tumisang adopted narcissistic reflexivity, where the researcher focuses on himself/herself (Maton, 2003), in which she only analyzed her own modes of construing.
Intersectionality
Although Tumisang reflected on her experience as a Black South African woman in
relation to White people, she also considered her account from the framework of
intersectionality, in which social categories (e.g., race, class, gender, sexual orientation)
intersect in individuals and groups (Crenshaw, 1991). Tumisang demonstrates her layers
of intersectionality in Figure 1.
One should not only be aware of intergroup differences (e.g., White versus Black
people) but also intragroup differences (e.g., Black men versus Black women, different
experiences within the group of Black women and Black men). Failing to recognize
intragroup differences might induce tension within the groups and prevent equality
from being achieved (Crenshaw, 1991).
For example, when Tumisang occupied a middle-management position at a government institution, her supervisor, a Black man, introduced her to a White woman as “Dr Sedumedi with a real PhD,” in contrast to her Black female colleague who also held a PhD. The nuance between Tumisang and her colleague was that Tumisang held a PhD in Psychology, which she obtained from the UK, while her peer had a PhD in a different field and achieved it in South Africa.
Figure 1. Tumisang’s intersectionality layers.
This account demonstrates that Black women might not necessarily experience dis
crimination in the same way. Sometimes, their experience of prejudice might be
differentiated by their occupational status, education, and where they studied, among
other discriminatory factors. The supervisor’s discrimination is subtle and could go
undetected unless one critically examines his use of “real”. It is, therefore, imperative
to construe that experiences of oppression and prejudice are not mutually exclusive
but intersectional (Crenshaw, 1991). In this reflexive paper, Tumisang also presents
another account of intersectionality in “Construing Racism with the Event Perceiver Grid”.
Character Sketch of a Woman Desiring to be Whitened
This reflexive paper draws on self-characterization, in which a person writes a character
sketch of himself/herself (Kelly, 1955). The author anticipated the method to facilitate
credulity, construing a person’s reality at face value (Kelly, 1955), and sociality, obtaining
an intimate understanding (Kelly, 1955), between herself and the reader (see Naffi &
Davidson, 2017). The technique aims to explicate the author’s desire to have White
skin and the pathway to reconstruing herself after encountering invalidations.
The author started writing a self-characterization in 2020 after experiencing racial attacks in 2019. It reads as follows:
Tumisang Precious Sedumedi grew up in Lethabong, a township on the outskirts
of Rustenburg in South Africa, where she lived in a one-bedroom corrugated iron
shack with her parents. The township was serviced by one clinic, which most people
walked many kilometers to access. Although the infrastructure has since improved, the people did not have electricity, shared a communal tap, and used pit toilets, which
she dreaded because of the immense worry of falling inside. The quality of the roads
31 years into democracy remains poor, even though her childhood memories of playing
on the dusty gravel roads with her friends are nostalgic. At that time, Tumisang nor-
malized this way of living.
She construed how White people lived during the monthly grocery shopping trips
to Rustenburg, about 50 kilometers from Lethabong. The difference in how she lived
compared to Whites and a few Blacks who could afford the so-called ‘White life’
involved the dichotomous constructs of privilege-underprivilege and easy-hard. Instead
of problematizing the dichotomy, Tumisang yearned to live the ‘White life’.
Although Tumisang had beautiful afro hair during childhood, she construed her
hair as unattractive and admired the lustrous hair of White women. She played imag-
inary games in which she wrapped a long white towel around her head and pretended
to have a White woman’s long hair. Tumisang imitated White women in American
movies by whipping her imaginary white hair back and forth and had an American accent.
Her desire to be a White girl child was intensified by seeing miniatures of White
women in textile stores and Tinker Bell dolls, which she construed as personifying
beauty. Her fascination with White women and their hair heightened to the extent
that she could not resist touching a White woman’s hair when she was six years old.
Tumisang’s association of Whiteness with beauty was perpetuated by her participation
in beauty pageant competitions, which she always lost, and the White girls always won.
In adolescence, Tumisang preferred being called by her English name, Precious,
because she was ashamed of her native name. She also distanced herself from Blackness by not speaking her mother tongue, Setswana2. She spoke only English and told people she could not speak Setswana. In adulthood, when she was studying in the UK, Tumisang dated a White man (Tom) because she did not see Black men as good enough.
The adolescent Tumisang seemed to be so obsessed with interracial romantic
relationships that she kept a personal journal of photos of Black women married to
White men and yearned that it would one day be her. Therefore, when an opportunity
presented itself, Tumisang wanted to make her dreams a reality.
Analyzing the Sketched Character
Tumisang seemed not to have been aware of personally experiencing racism before
the age of 34 years old because she did not experience it at a high level of cognitive
awareness. Based on the analysis of the sketched character, Tumisang appears to have
subsumed the social constructions of Blackness and Whiteness created during colonization and Apartheid into her construct system and construed her skin color as
‘mathata3.’ Compared to the participants in Odusanya, Winter, Nolte, and Shah’s (2018)
study, who felt that their Blackness was construed negatively by other people, Tumisang construed her Black skin negatively. Therefore, based on Hoch (1979) and Tafira (2016), Tumisang seemed to incorporate into her personal constructions of the self the social meanings of Blackness as impure, a construing process which Kelly (1955) referred to as constellatory, in which stereotypical meanings are used to construe.
In her desperation to be whitened, Tumisang related with some Black people who
wanted to be whitened (see Fanon, 1986). She attempted to slot-rattle, reconstruing from the opposite construct pole (Kelly, 1969), and self-construe from the pole of
Whiteness, by preferring to be called Precious. Her Tswana name seemed to induce
a sense of discomfort, especially when she was among Whites, a similar sense echoed
by Odusanya et al. (2018) participants.
Tumisang aggressively (in Kelly’s (1955) sense of trying out new constructs) dated
Tom to experience dating a White person. Furthermore, based on her idealization of
White people, Tumisang possibly tightly anticipated (involving precise predictions (Kelly,
1955)) Tom to validate her anticipation of herself as attractive to Whites. Similar to
the participants in Odusanya et al. (2018), Tumisang seemed to desire to be accepted
by Whites.
However, Tumisang encountered invalidations when Tom cheated on her with a
White woman. Seeing Tom holding hands with the woman at the mall induced a sense
of shame, construing oneself as dislodged from other people’s construing of her (McCoy,
1977). She perceived Tom seeing her as not worthy to be seen with in public, partic
ularly since he had never taken her out. Although Tom often told her that she was
his “guilty pleasure” and showed her beautiful photos of the White women he dated,
Tumisang stayed in the toxic relationship because she hostilely (forcefully wanting to
validate invalidated constructions (Kelly, 1955)) sought Tom’s acceptance and validation.
She directed anger, an awareness of invalidation of constructions which might lead to
hostility (McCoy, 1977), toward herself for having a curvy body. Therefore, Tumisang
hostilely exercised to have a slimmer body like White women.
Tumisang’s encounter with Tom and the White girls in the beauty pageant compe
titions formed the basis of her anticipation, a process which Kelly (1970) termed the
Experience Cycle. The cycle indicates that an individual uses binary constructs to
anticipate, invest in the anticipation, and encounter the event, and based on validational
or invalidational evidence, retains or rejects constructions (Kelly, 1970). As a result of
the repeated construing of White women always chosen, Tumisang tightly anticipated
Whites to occupy the winning pole when she assumed the losing pole in the polarity
that Ugazio (2013) describes as ‘winning-losing’. Therefore, she wished that her skin
color was changeable.
However, as Tumisang grew older and saw Black women such as Basetsana Kumalo4
and Chimamanda Adichie5 who embraced their Blackness, she gradually revised her
personal constructions of Blackness-Whiteness. She made an elaborative choice to
reconstrue herself as admirable, an example of the choice corollary in which one makes
an alternative elaborative choice in a dichotomized construct (Kelly, 1955).
