Chester Pierce was born in 1927; by 1952 he was a graduate of the  Harvard Medical School. He went on to become president of the American  Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and president of the American  Orthopsychiatric Association. He was elected to the Institute of  Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences and had an annual research  seminar named after him by the National Medical Association. Founding chair of the Black Psychiatrists of America, Pierce  has profoundly affected American psychiatry and the thinking of African  American psychiatrists during the last two decades. While recognized for  his substantive scholarship on coping with extreme environments such as  the South Pole, he is probably best known for his theories regarding  how blacks cope with racism in the United States. In Race and Excellence, Ezra Griffith, also an African  American professor of psychiatry, engages Pierce in a dialogue with the  goal of clarifying the inter-connection between the personal and the  professional in the lives of both black scholars. The text melds the  story of Pierce's life and his achievements, with particular attention  to his theories about the predictable nature of racist behavior and the  responses of oppressed groups. Having earned his doctorate a generation  after Pierce, Griffith approaches his conversation with Pierce as a  face-to-face meeting between mentor and student. Retelling Pierce's life  story ultimately becomes for Griffith an exercise in conceptualizing  his own experience. As he writes, “I never just wanted to tell Chet's  story; I wanted to work his story out, to measure it, to try it on, to  figure out which parts are good for me and other blacks so earnestly  seeking heroes.”

Race and Excellence: My Dialogue with Chester Pierce PDF

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