Mid-century psychiatry held that oppression shaped every trait of Black personality

Evidence

The Negro, in contrast to the White, is an unhappy person; he has a harder environment to live in, and internal stress is greater. By “unhappy” we mean he enjoys less, he suffers more. There is not one personality trait of the Negro the source of which cannot be traced to his difficult living conditions. There are no exceptions to this rule. The final result is a wretched internal life. (p. 81, emphasis added) Allport, in contrast, considered a variety of possible responses under the more general proposition that “ego-defenses” must be developed to cope with the daily assaults on well-being, dignity, and human value. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1042

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Instantiation of the self-hatred hypothesis that James Baldwin and others directly rebutted; also contrasts with Allport’s more adaptive view.

Related

• Kardiner and Ovesy held that every Black personality trait traces to hardship (similarity 0.89)
• Only one of sixteen ego-defenses Allport described was self-hatred (similarity 0.80)
• Allport’s intrapsychic model missed multi-level identity dynamics (similarity 0.80)
• Allport’s individual-level account missed culture’s role in victim responses (similarity 0.79)
• Allport’s ego-defense account missed dynamic individual-group connections (similarity 0.79)
• Allport catalogued specific psychological defenses for resolving egalitarian-racist conflict. (similarity 0.78)
• Allport rejected the premise that prejudice harmfully affects all its targets uniformly (similarity 0.78)