My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement

By Dr. Price Cobbs 

 

Dr. Price Cobbs helped change the way America looks at racism when he co-authored the seminal study Black Rage at the height of the Black Power movement. The New York Times called it, “One of the most important books on blacks,” while Robert Coles, writing in The New Republic, said it is “a book that takes account of the ambiguities in the psychological make-up of black people and, of course, all the rest of us.” In his new book, My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement (Atria Books; September 20, 2005; $24.00), this iconic figure in the African-American community revisits some of the revolutionary ideas he unleashed in that groundbreaking book, this time using his own extraordinary life as the prism through which to refract issues of racism, civil rights, and self-worth. A memoir of profound insight and extraordinary candor, My American Life offers a clear-sighted overview of the black experience in America during the last seventy-five years, and suggests that there is still far to go in the struggle for equality among people of all ethnicities and colors. 

As Dr. Cobbs chronicles his life and career, he highlights his personal encounters with racism—during his middle class childhood in Los Angeles, his stint in the military, time spent in Nashville during medical school, his early medical career in San Francisco— and how they shaped his ideas and fueled his achievements. He reveals how he grew to formulate the pioneering ideas of “ethnotherapy,” which look at patients with mental disorders as products of their society and culture. He examines how the psychology of race continues to play a major role in the way many blacks fail to realize their full “entitlement”—their fundamental rights as American citizens.  

“Racism looms like an iceberg in the Arctic Sea,” Dr. Cobbs writes. “It is huge and immobile and what lies above the water must be avoided, but the real danger lies in what is unseen. I've observed the effects racism has had on me, on others, and the changes that racism itself has undergone. I know that when white people say that racism no longer exists in this country, they are wrong. And that when black people say they are still imprisoned by it, they too are wrong.”