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Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry
InUnder the Strain of Color, Gabriel N. Mendes recaptures the history of Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a New York City institution that embodied new ways of thinking about mental health, race, and the substance of citizenship.
The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, the writer Richard Wright, and the clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic emerged in the context of a widespread American concern with the mental health of its citizens. Mendes shows the clinic to have been simultaneously a scientific and political gambit, challenging both a racist mental health care system and supposedly color-blind psychiatrists who failed to consider the consequences of oppression in their assessment and treatment of African American patients. Employing the methods of oral history, archival research, textual analysis, and critical race philosophy, Under the Strain of Color contributes to a growing body of scholarship that highlights the interlocking relationships among biomedicine, institutional racism, structural violence, and community health activism.
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Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry
InUnder the Strain of Color, Gabriel N. Mendes recaptures the history of Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a New York City institution that embodied new ways of thinking about mental health, race, and the substance of citizenship.
The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, the writer Richard Wright, and the clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic emerged in the context of a widespread American concern with the mental health of its citizens. Mendes shows the clinic to have been simultaneously a scientific and political gambit, challenging both a racist mental health care system and supposedly color-blind psychiatrists who failed to consider the consequences of oppression in their assessment and treatment of African American patients. Employing the methods of oral history, archival research, textual analysis, and critical race philosophy, Under the Strain of Color contributes to a growing body of scholarship that highlights the interlocking relationships among biomedicine, institutional racism, structural violence, and community health activism.
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Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry
InUnder the Strain of Color, Gabriel N. Mendes recaptures the history of Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a New York City institution that embodied new ways of thinking about mental health, race, and the substance of citizenship.
The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, the writer Richard Wright, and the clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic emerged in the context of a widespread American concern with the mental health of its citizens. Mendes shows the clinic to have been simultaneously a scientific and political gambit, challenging both a racist mental health care system and supposedly color-blind psychiatrists who failed to consider the consequences of oppression in their assessment and treatment of African American patients. Employing the methods of oral history, archival research, textual analysis, and critical race philosophy, Under the Strain of Color contributes to a growing body of scholarship that highlights the interlocking relationships among biomedicine, institutional racism, structural violence, and community health activism.
Gabriel N. Mendes is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego.
Table of Contents
Introduction: "Under the Strain of Color"1. "This Burden of Consciousness": Richard Wright and the Psychology of Race Relations, 1927–19472. "Intangible Difficulties": Dr. Fredric Wertham and the Politics of Psychiatry in the Interwar Years3. "Between the Sewer and the Church": The Emergence of the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic4. Children and the Violence of Racism: The Lafargue Clinic, Comic Books, and the Case against School SegregationEpilogue: "An Experiment in the Social Basis of Psychotherapy"Notes Index
What People are Saying About This
Alondra Nelson
In this highly original and insightful work, Gabriel N. Mendes unearths the little-known history of the Lafargue Clinic, a community healing space where black Harlemites sought refuge from mental illness and otherwise callous psychiatric care in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on an impressive array of sources, Mendes creatively harnesses biography to show how the social realism of renowned author Richard Wright extended to his founding role in this clinic that linked African Americans' Jim Crow social realities to the politics of mental health. This study reminds us that the now accepted idea that stressors like racism and poverty tax the mind, body and spirit was proposed by a daring, interracial group of physicians, clergy, artists and others more than sixty years ago. Under the Strain of Color offers deep and nuanced historical perspective on today's racial health disparities.
Jonathan Metzl
I started reading Under the Strain of Color and could not put the book down—practically every page contains some remarkable find, deep insight, or startling idea. At its core, this beautifully written and clearly argued book tells the definitive history of a mid-twentieth-century treatment center, the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, that provided psychiatric care to those who had been previously excluded from it. But as Under the Strain of Color unfolds, it becomes much more. In Gabriel Mendes's hands, the story of the clinic morphs into a much larger object lesson about community, common cause, and the relationships between race relations, mass culture, and the mental and cultural health of the American citizenry at midcentury. Along the way, the book addresses many central questions about racial justice, mental health, and the ways that normative models of the mind produce both liberatory and oppressive capabilities. I am quite certain that Under the Strain of Color will make a vital impact across a number of fields and will be required reading for years to come.
Dr. Cornel West
This is a brilliant and pioneering work of scholarship that highlights an overlooked reality in Black America—the pervasive need for institutions dedicated to addressing Black Mental Health.
Samuel Kelton Roberts
Anyone who has thought about the history of postwar American liberalism, race, social medicine, and psychiatry probably has wished for the existence of more scholarly treatment of this important subject and will be exhilarated to read Under the Strain of Color. The insights provided by Gabriel N. Mendes will generate many fruitful discussions and inquiries for years to come.