Kobi Kambon

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 schoolteacher 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 was the 9th of 10 children, with four sisters and five brothers. He attended Walker County Training School for junior high school and high school, and attended Wilson Jr. College in Chicago. Kambon was briefly drafted in the army from 1965 to 1967. Kambon transferred to DePaul University in Chicago in 1969, where he received his bachelor's degree in psychology. He then acquired a Master of Arts degree in personality-abnormal psychology from Roosevelt University in 1971 and a Ph.D. in personality and social psychology from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1975. ==Academic career==

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 wrote, developed and contributed to over 60 scholarly publications, including five books. He was 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 also developed various instruments and measures to assess Black personality and mental health variables. ==Major contributions==

African (Black) psychology: issues and synthesis In his article African (Black) Psychology: Issues and Synthesis, Kobi Kambon provided a general overview of his Africentric approach to studying the psychology of Black Americans. ==Legacy==

Kobi Kambon influenced the field of African (Black) psychology, contributing 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 was 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==

• • • • Baldwin, J. A., & Hopkins, R. (1990). African-American and European-American cultural differences as assessed by the worldviews paradigm: An empirical analysis. The Western Journal of Black Studies. • • Baldwin, J. A. (1980). The psychology of oppression. Contemporary black thought, 95–110. • Bell, Y. R., Bouie, C. L., & Baldwin, J. A. (1990). Afrocentric cultural consciousness and African-American male-female relationships. Journal of Black Studies, 162–189. • Baldwin, J. A., Brown, R., & Hopkins, R. (1991). The black self-hatred paradigm revisited: An Africentric analysis. • Jamison, D. (2016). Kobi K.K. Kambon (Joseph A. Baldwin): Portrait of an African-centered psychologist. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0021934716653354 ==References==