Identity Orchestration: Black Lives, Balance, and the Psychology of Self Stories [Paperback]

Identity Orchestrationillustrates the importance of identity balance in behavioral health as seen through a personality psychology lens. The contributors to this collection deeply engage the self and psychological strength by examining race, gender, class, and context with narratives that highlight the asset-based constructs of identity.David Wall Riceis professor in the Department of Psychology at Morehouse College and principal investigator of the Identity, Art & Democracy Lab.

In this volume, Identity Orchestration: Black Lives, Balance and the Psychology of Self Stories, we are nourished by the stunning prose of David Wall Rice who invites us to enter a jazz space of Black lives, stories, and rhythms, riffing and innovating, vulnerable and bold, at Morehouse College. Rice, a theorist-teacher-grandson-father and a psychologist reviews the complexities of lives lived fully, situated in contexts of oppression and joy, rooted in music and story, fed by whispers of love. He, and his colleagues, offer up a rich reservoir of stories narrated by Black artists, musicians, students, activists, teachers, scholars, and everyday people, animated in essays that speak to full and complex persons-in-motion, racialized and gendered, enacting selves through dance and freedom dreams, college and church, basketball and prison, school and love, Shakespeare and Black male friendships, residues of crack and love again. With echoes of Du Bois and Fanon, Rice refuses to turn away from the scar tissue of racism but attends exquisitely to the vibrancy of Black desires, aesthetics and creativity. Honoring young people who are trying always, in the words of Baldwin, to begin again, Rice has spawned a radical reimagination for how we understand Black lives in dignity. Read this volume, teach this volume, give this book. You will thank Rice for conducting such a provocative orchestra of Black lives and you will cherish Grandpa Buddy for instilling in grandbaby David a senlÃh