Written by a clinical and forensic psychologist, Marse: A Psychological Portrait of the American Southern White Elite Slave Master and His Endurig Impact focuses on the white men who composed the southern planter class. The book is a psychological autopsy of the mind and slaveholding behavior that helps explain the enduring roots of white supremacy and the hidden wound of racist slavery that continues to affect all Americans today.
Marse details and illuminates examples of the psychological mechanisms by which southern slave masters justified owning another human being as property and how they formed a society in which it was morally acceptable. Kirkpatrick uses forensic psychology to analyze the personality formation, defense mechanisms, and psychopathologies of slave masters. Their delusional beliefs and assumptions about black Africans extended to a forceful cohort of white slaveholding women, and they twisted Christianity to promote slavery as a positive good. He examines the masters’ stress and fears, and how they developed psychologically fatal, slavery-specific defense mechanisms to cope. Through sources such as diaries, letters, autobiographies, and sermons, Marse describes the ways in which slaveholders created a delusional worldview that sanctioned cruel instruments of punishment, and the laws and social policies of domination used to rob Blacks of their human rights. In light of the seismic shift in race relations our nation is experiencing right now, this book is timely because it will advance our understanding of the South’s self-defeating romance with racist slavery and its latent and chronic effects. The parallels between the psychology of antebellum slaveholding and today’s racism are palpable.
About the Author :
H. D. Kirtpatrick
Is a Forensic psychologist and Historian He is currently a research associate in the American Studies Department at UNC-Charlotte.
He teaches an undergraduate course entitled, “Up Close and Personal” The History of Slavery in Mecklenburg County. 7 years ago he discovered that his great-great grandfather owned Jimmie Lee Kirkpatrick’s ( a high school acquaintance and first black high school footballer in NC b ) great-great-great grandfather as a slave in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Since 2015, he has lectured with Jimmie Lee about our ancestral story approximately thirty times.
Review :
A remarkable book: passionate and analytical, historical and personal. Be prepared to reexamine what you think you know about the United States' past and present. Thomas Cole, Ph.D.
Librarian, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library
Combining history and forensic psychology, Kirkpatrick deeply explores how slaveholders justified to themselves owning other human beings. Unique and troubling, Marse traces the construction of a collective pathology and documents the enslavers' psychological acrobatics. This is unforgettable and necessary work on the hard history of slavery, here unsparingly depicted. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore
Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor Emerita, Yale University
Marse is an honest, thoughtful analysis of the white supremacist mindset of nineteenth-century southern culture. Through searing forensic psychological analyses of white slaveholders and his own family's role in the "peculiar institution," H.D. Kirkpatrick reveals what most white people know but refuse to acknowledge: our country's indebtedness to the enslaved, and in turn, our inextricable connection to each other. Jeffrey B. Leak, Ph.D.
Professor of English and Africana Studies and Director of American Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
POWERFUL; POIGNANT; EXQUISITELY DESCRIPTIVE; CONSTRUCTIVELY DISTURBING; AND, UNFORTUNATELY, REMARKABLY TIMELY. David A. Martindale, Ph.D.
Forensic Psychologist
