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

Identity Orchestration demonstrates the particular importance of identity balance in behavioral health. The contributors to this collection deeply engage with identity and psychological strength by examining race, gender, class, and context through stories, highlighting the asset- and story-based constructs of identity.

Table of Contents:
Part I: The Lab and Storied Identity Chapter 1: Hip-hop Narratives as a Natural Start David Wall Rice Chapter 2: Rakim, Ice Cube then Watch the Throne David Wall Rice Chapter 3: I Stank I Can, I Know I Can, I Will: Songwriting Self-Efficacy as an Expression of Identity Orchestration Jacque-Corey Cormier Part II: Self Complexity Chapter 4: The Theory of Race Self Complexity and Narrative Personality: Is the Meaning of Race Processed Narratively? Cynthia Winston-Proctor Chapter 5: Reflections on Black Women, Family, Offline Archiving and Identity Asha Grant Chapter 6: Writing Wrongs: Identity Orchestration and Coping in Prison Carlton Lewis Chapter 7: From Corporate to Camera: Identity Orchestration and Finding Purpose Mikki Kathleen Harris Chapter 8: A Picture of James Baldwin Dancing for Freedom: Social Dance And Identity Orchestration Asha L. French and C. Malik Boykin Chapter 9: Eleven Days Older Than: Riffs of Reflexivity, Teaching, and the Global Exercise of Being Whole David Wall Rice Part III: Orchestration Chapter 10: Complicating Black Boys David Wall Rice Chapter 11: Between Shakespeare and Showing Up William Marcel Hayes Chapter 12: High-Stakes Orchestration: Understanding Expressions of Identity and Appeals to Belonging in the College Personal Statement Gregory Davis Chapter 13: Black Boys, “Church” and Supplementary Education, General Considerations David Wall Rice, Brenda Wall, and William Marcel Hayes Chapter 14: Seeing the Unseen: The Role of Identity on Empathy Modulation Kristin Moody Chapter 15: LeBron James, Personalized Goal Complexity and Identity Orchestration Jason M. Jones Part IV: Making Meaning Chapter 16: The Black Athletic Aesthetic: Fast Thoughts on Sport, Art and the Self as Freedom Work David Wall Rice Chapter 17: Culture in the Age of the Revitalized Athlete Activist: Sports as a Microcosm of Society Post George Floyd Chelsea Heyward Chapter 18: Running Beyond the Regulation of Sport Grant Bennett and Micah Holmes Chapter 19: Love You, Man: Negotiating Racism, Isolation and Vulnerability in Black Male Peer Relationships Malachi Richardson Chapter 20: A Worldwide Home Robert Shannon Chapter 21: Crack’s Residue Donovan X. Ramsey Chapter 22: A Contemporary Spelman College Social Identity as Motivated by the 2012 Violence Against Women Course Petition Brielle McDaniel

About the Author :
David Wall Rice is professor in the Department of Psychology at Morehouse College and principal investigator of the Identity, Art & Democracy Lab.

Review :
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 sense of wonder, humility, and the joy of inquiry. In the year when the American Psychological Association published an apology for historic racism, this volume is gift to readers, a gift to psychology, and a gesture toward disciplinary reparations. As a scholar David Wall Rice is relentlessly, brilliantly engaged with the most pressing concerns in black life. Here he has brought together a collection of similarly sharp minds to probe vital questions of identity, narrative, and race. We are the stories we tell, as the saying goes, and this volume highlights the simple profundity of that idea. Identity Orchestration contributes mightily to our understanding of the development and functioning of the human self. It situates its timely revelations in a world that teeters on the edges of breathtaking technological advances and catastrophic social and political unraveling. Professor David Wall Rice, serving as editor and interlocuter, sees that the contributors employ the life stories of African Americans as a lens through which identity and the self are viewed. Rice masterfully and subtly shepherds two additional agendas. He extends the publishing legacy of Reginald L. Jones, also a son of Morehouse College, who in over 20 texts in Black Psychology featured wide arrays of scholarly voices. Jones would be pleased with the interdisciplinary lineup Rice recruits for this volume. Of importance to followers of mainstream psychology, under Rice’s editorship, Identity Orchestration treats topics in personality psychology without losing sight of the person. Professor Rice and his contributors reveal that at their best, psychological studies allow their participants to walk, leap, and dance as whole beings across the printed page. Each chapter of this remarkable book invites us to appreciate the miracle of being human.