The Psychopathic Racial Personality

An analysis by the late Dr. Bobby Wright (1934 - 1982)

From Wikipedia:

Bobby Eugene Wright (March 1, 1934, Hobson City, Alabama – April 6, 1982, Chicago) was an American clinical psychologist, scholar, educator, political activist and humanitarian.

He received his BSc in lllEducation and MSc in lllCounseling from Chicago State University and his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Chicago in 1972.^[1] At the time of his death, he was president-elect of the Association of Black Psychologists.^[2]

During the mid 1960s he worked as a truant officer in the Chicago Public School system, and led a successful challenge to racist hiring procedures for black teachers. His political work has been credited with helping lay foundations that later enabled the election of Chicago's first African-American mayor, Harold Washington in 1983.^[3]

Two of his scholarly works have been described as highly influential by the 2013 National Conference on African/Black Psychology: The Psychopathic Racial Personality (1974, republished in 1984 and other years as one in a series of essays), and Mentacide: The Ultimate Threat to Black Survival (1979).^[2]

His work emphasized the need to recognize psychological racial warfare, and for Africans¹ to define themselves in their terms, while analyzing the psychology of White supremacy not only of its victims, and to develop a durable social theory and associated institutions to change the politics of mental health.^[4]

Purpose of this Substack submission

Before briefly explaining the purpose of this Substack submission, I would like to add something that was not mentioned about Dr. Wright in the Wikipedia entry. As I recall, he was one of the individuals who had been asked to help re-write portions of the Illinois psychiatric code. The reader can search for sources to verify.

I am introducing Dr. Wright to the Substack community simply for the purpose of (I hope!) widening the perspective of the reader. Bobby was a very significant part of the Black experience of America. When a people are oppressed, it is natural that they will attempt to seek reasons that their oppressors are the way that they are. Bobby concluded that Whites suffered from psychopathy. That ain’t for me to decide.

As I said, when a people are oppressed, they will at least wonder the reason. Bobby drew his conclusion, and did so using the tools of the discipline that, as you can see in the above Wikipedia entry, he had mastered on the highest level.

Bobby was extremely serious, but he also had an edgy sense of humor. Here’s an example. Back in the 1970s, I attended his weekly lectures at Northeastern Illinois University Center for Inner City Studies, more popularly known as “The Communiversity,” which were held starting at 8:00 a.m., every Saturday morning. He gave the following reason for scheduling his lectures that early:

“The only Black folks that are gonna get up at 7:00 a.m. to come to my 8:00 a.m. lectures—on Saturday mornings—are serious Black folks. Since—as ya’ll know—most of our peole ain’t serious, we can be assured that these weekly sessions will be productive and refreshingly devoid of bullshit.”

As sarcastically (if not stereotypically) harsh as that sounds, Bobby was the single-most Black person I’d ever met who literally was in deep love with his people, and who spent his every waking hour in service to his people, Black people, in his effort to “raise us up.”

If you are white, you just might have a little problem with what, in his book, he proposes as a solution for what he believed was a psychopathy peculiar to white folks.

But, again, the severe oppression that our people had suffered from, throughout the centuries, caused Bobby, as well as many, many Black folks to seriously wonder:

I’ll let the reader peform his or her own homework, although I’ll embed, below, a long lecture, by Bobby, on what he called Metacide. As regards his book, The Psychopathic Racial Personality, the reader can find that book for himself or herself.

1. When Bobby refered to “Africans” his usage was inclusive of people of African descent, wherever they were located, whether in Africa, the Carribean, the U.S., or anywhere else in the world.