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Throughout his esteemed career, William Cross has tried to reconcile how Black men he met in the barber shop “seemed so normal,” but the portrayal in college textbooks of Black people in general—and the Black working class in particular—is self-hating and pathological. In Black Identity Viewed from a Barber’s Chair, Cross revisits his ground-breaking model on Black identity awakening known as Nigrescence, connects W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of double consciousness to an analysis of how Black identity is performed in everyday life, and traces the origins of the deficit perspective on Black culture to scholarship dating back to the 1930s. He follows with a critique showing such deficit and Black self-hatred tropes were always based on extremely weak evidence. 

Black Identity Viewed from a Barber’s Chair ends with a new understanding of the psychology of slavery that helps explain why and how, during the first twelve years of emancipation, countless former slaves exhibited amazing psychological, political, and cultural independence.  Once free, their previously hidden psychology became public. 

His booksets out to disrupt and agitate as Cross attempts to more accurately capture the humanity of Black people that has been overlooked in previous research.

Linking the writings of the great humanist psychologist Erich Fromm to criminology, this collection shows how viewing crime patterns and the criminal justice system from Fromm's humanist perspective opens a path to more effective and more humane ways of understanding and dealing with crime and criminals.

Contributors to Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology draw on Fromm's writings on alienation, sadomasochism, and patriarchal/matriarchal values to assess the kinds of crimes being committed and the kinds of people committing them. They explore the spiritual and intellectual sources of Fromm's thought--including Jewish theology, Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Buddhism--and demonstrate how his socialist humanism points toward a society free of crime and violence. This volume also includes translations of two of Fromm's early articles on criminal justice, never before available in English, in which he develops a psychoanalytic Marxist critique of the role of criminal justice in a class society.

At a time when American society seems bent, to an unprecedented degree, on imprisonment, executions, and other violent responses to the problem of crime, Fromm's humanist critique offers a unique vantage point from which to renew and develop a critical criminology.

In his quest to understand and describe the behavior of the Mexican, the distinguished Mexican psychologist R. Díaz-Guerrero combines a strong theoretical interest in the relationship of culture to personality with a pragmatic concern for methodology. This collection of essays is rooted both in studies of Mexican psychology as an independent phenomenon and in cross-cultural comparisons of Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Anglo-Americans.

Dr. Díaz-Guerrero discusses Mexican attitudes toward sex roles and the family, motivations of the Mexican worker, and other topics. He compares Mexican and American concepts of respect and analyzes the relation between neurosis and the Mexican family structure. He attempts to determine the degree of mental, personal, and social health of urban Mexicans. The importance of basic sociocultural premises, such as "The mother is the dearest person in existence," and "The stricter the parents are, the better the children turn out," is explored. In one essay, Díaz-Guerrero notes the differences in typical reactions to stress in Mexico and the United States, concluding that the American pattern involves active response to stress, whereas the Mexican response tends to be more passive.

Psychology of the Mexican deals with a variety of historical, psychological, biological, social, economic, and anthropological variables, attempting to treat them in a scientific way through the use of carefully constructed questionnaires, with detailed statistical analyses of the results. On the basis of data obtained in this way, the author formulates broad conceptual schemes with immediate application to the understanding of human behavior in real situations. He is particularly intrigued by the way the individual relates to the significant people in his environment. For the Mexican, he says, such interpersonal relationships are the most important part of life; in contrast to the American insistence on liberty and equality, Mexican culture emphasizes affiliation and love.

A landmark collection of the best work of two major figures in the study of psychoanalysis and literature