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 a gift to readers, a gift to psychology, and a gesture toward disciplinary reparations.

Michelle Fine, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and University of South Africa

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.

Jelani Cobb, Columbia University and The New Yorker

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.

Camara Jules P. Harrell, Howard University

Identity Orchestration contributes to and advances the work of interdisciplinary scholars, thought leaders and influencers within and outside of the Academy. Like W.E.B. Du Bois and Kimberle Crenshaw, Rice recognizes the varied ways the development and construction of self must be situated within an understanding of how dominant narratives seek to define us in ways that do not honor the complexities of our lived experiences. The very thoughtful reflections on how we gain meaning and “being” in a world that was not constructed for us as Black people, is powerful and penetrating. The ability of Rice to connect and intersect theoretical frameworks to better understand how race, class and gender inform the day-to-day realities of individuals trying to give meaning to their lives, while imagining a world where their personal and political selves are unfettered by dominant ideological and structural constraints is both instructive and illuminating.

Cynthia Neal Spence, Spelman College