Shortly before his death in 1960, Richard Wright professed that he thought himself to be “something, no matter how crudely, of a psychologist” (19). In this important study, Jay Garcia identifies Wright as the prime mover within a vanguard of American literary intellectuals who reframed public discussion of race in the United States during the 1940s by drawing on the language and concepts of psychology. Rejecting both the evasive, euphemistic notion of “the Negro problem” and what they considered to be inadequate, reductive materialist accounts of racial hierarchy, a generation of antiracist authors and critics set out to explore what the lawyer Boris Max in Wright's novel Native Son (1940) calls the “unconscious machinery of race relations” (29).

Historians such as Ellen Herman have revealed the extent to which American thought and culture in the 1940s were suffused with the “romance” of psychology, as insights gleaned from the burgeoning psychological professions held out the prospect of remedies to all manner of personal and societal ills. Garcia deftly enhances our picture of this moment by demonstrating how antiracist discourse was transformed by writers who turned their focus to the inner realm, and who inquired into the psychological needs and processes that produced and reproduced America's racial hierarchy, and the psychological consequences that that hierarchy entailed. More significantly, Psychology Comes to Harlem stages an acute and potentially highly productive intervention in scholarship on the history of representations of African Americans.

Studies by Daryl Michael Scott, Alice O'Connor, and others have emphasized the negative, unintended consequences of critiques of racial injustice that sought to expose the social and psychological “damage” and “pathology” engendered among African Americans by the oppressive conditions they endured. As Scott argued forcefully in his influential book Contempt and Pity (1997), liberal or progressive depictions of black life that were intended to evoke empathy all too often stigmatized their subjects and reinforced prevailing notions of black inferiority. What Garcia ably demonstrates, however, is that the generation of writers who steered American discussion of race into the realm of psychology portrayed black “damage” as only one manifestation of the pervasive harm inflicted on the psyches of all Americans by the perverse practices of segregation and white supremacy.

Exploring the work of Wright and a cluster of authors whom he influenced (Chester Himes, Horace Cayton, Ralph Ellison, C. L. R. James, Lillian Smith, and James Baldwin), Garcia makes a compelling case that prior to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, psychologically grounded indictments of racism depicted American society in its entirety – not just African Americans – as victims of what Ellison called “the American hierarchical psychosis” (92). Cayton, a sociologist best known as the coauthor with St. Clair Drake of Black Metropolis (1945), characterized white Americans as “casualties of our industrial civilization” who “turn to the Negro to find an object for their frustrated hate and love.” The cost of American racism, for Cayton, was the nation's “failure to achieve a mature culture in which Negroes and whites alike can accomplish some aspect of personality integration” (86–87). As Garcia insists, only the exigencies of the Brown case led to an increasingly exclusive focus on black pathology; the social-science statement submitted by the NAACP to buttress its case against segregated schooling collapsed the rich seam of psychological–cultural thinking about the widespread effects of racism into a single, highly resonant claim that segregation damaged the personalities of African Americans.

This insight has potentially far-reaching consequences for scholarship on race within American studies and beyond. In Contempt and Pity, Scott contended that so extensive was the harm done to the antiracist cause by its employment of “damage imagery” that, henceforth, “experts who study social groups, particularly those who engage in policy debates, should place the inner lives of people off limits.”Footnote ¹ By revealing how antiracist discourse in the years before Brown incorporated assertions of black psychic turmoil into much broader claims about the psychological costs of racism to all Americans, Garcia's study implies the possibility – perhaps the necessity – of lifting the embargo on discussion of racism's effects on people's “inner lives.” If the psychological ramifications of racial injustice, and of the whole intellectual apparatus of “race,” can once again be decoupled from the narrow fixation on black pathology, the possibility reemerges that antiracist scholarship and activism might engage public interest in the costs – including the costs to our emotional lives – of living amid inequality.

Yet Garcia might have given more consideration to the claims of anti-pathologists, including not only Scott but also the later Ralph Ellison of the 1960s and his intellectual comrade Albert Murray. For them, the problem of pathologism lies not only in its lack of attention to the pathologies of white Americans, but also in its often skewed, partial, relentlessly bleak portrayal of black life as a morass of dysfunction and misery seemingly devoid of agency, creativity, ingenuity, or solidarity.