The Themes Concerning Blacks (TCB) Projective Technique as a Measure of Racial Identity: An Exploratory Cross-Cultural Study

The usefulness of the Themes Concerning Blacks (TCB) as a measure of racial identification was explored among African American, African Dutch, and African Surinamese samples. Generally, most of the characters on the TCB cards were perceived by all three groups in ways parallel to the objective description of the cards, the highest number of recorded themes was given to the same cards by all groups, the emotional tone of most of the stories was moderately sad, the outcome of most stories was neutral, and Afrotypic (race-specific) content was significantly absentfrom stories. The absence may be due to the adverse effects of oppression on identity, guarded behavior in the testing situation, and the crudeness of the scoring system. Recommendations forfuture studies using the TCB are given.