Balance - by David Wall Rice (Hardcover)

About the Book

Balance is unique in that it approaches Black males from a well-rooted personality perspective within context, sans deficit, and utilizes discourse analysis in attempts at advancing identity theory.

Book Synopsis

Balance is unique in that it approaches Black males from a well-rooted personality perspective within context, sans deficit, and utilizes discourse analysis in attempts at advancing identity theory.

Review Quotes

Balance signals the presence of a fresh voice in the field of psychology and hip-hop culture. David Wall Rice is an intellectual architect of the emerging post-modern engagement of culture studies and the social sciences as they pertain to the African American male experience and beyond. His work is richly informed and authenticated by his immersion in the Morehouse College milieu and offers important insight to all who read it. This is an important book for our time.

David Wall Rice has written a fascinating book that adds a new dimension to the scholarship on Black men. Not nearly enough study has been done of Black male success, and Rice's analysis of how Black males cope and thrive is an important contribution.

Identity-talk is hard talk. Rice offers us a provocative way of tackling not only the difficult issues around identity formation, he simultaneously reminds us-in a manner that is bold and unflinching-of the tremendous power and resilience of African American men. A wonderful contribution indeed!

In this engaging and overdue work, David Wall Rice develops a theoretical strategy for achieving more respectful and insightful understandings of the situated dynamics and agendas of identity-constitution and identity-maintenance-'identity statis'-of African American male adolescents. With such understandings should come recognition and appreciation of the positive accomplishments and tremendous potential of this much maligned, often troubled, too frequently at-risk segment of the U.S. American population.

The very survival of the black race in America turns on our ability to address and arrest the metastasizing social crisis of the young black male. David Wall Rice in his fine new book helps us to decode and understand the identity issues that have formed at the core of this dilemma, while having us take seriously the heavy responsibility we must share for the safeguarding of our future.

This book presents a masterful discussion of the cultural and racial identity of young African American males. Rice uses a strengths-based approach to explore the concept of human identity through group sessions with six African American male teenagers. The author listens carefully to the voices of these young men as they struggle for authenticity and balance in their lives as they are consistently confronted by negative stereotypes of themselves. Rice provides a valuable analysis of a group rarely understood by most Americans.

About the Author

David Wall Rice is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Morehouse College.