H.D. Kirkpatrick, Ph. D.

Marse by H.D. Kirkpatrick, Ph.D.

 Read the article and review of Marse by NAATP member Dovie Coleman:

HERE

Marse: A Psychological Portrait of the Southern Slave Master and His Legacy of White Supremacy focuses on the white men who composed the antebellum Southern planter class in the period of 1830–1861. This book is a psychological autopsy of the minds and behaviors of enslavers that helps explain the enduring roots of white supremacy and the hidden wounds of racist slavery that continue to affect Americans today. Marse details and illustrates examples of the psychological mechanisms by which southern slave masters justified owning another human being as property and how they formed a society in which enslavement was morally acceptable. Kirkpatrick uses forensic psychology to analyze the personality formation, defense mechanisms, and psychopathologies of slave masters. Their delusional beliefs and assumptions about Black Africans extended to a forceful cohort of white slaveholding women, as well as how they twisted Christianity to promote slavery as a positive good. He examines the masters’ stresses and fears and how they coped by developing psychologically fatal, slavery-specific defense mechanisms. Utilizing sources such as the vast treasure trove of slavery historiography, diaries, letters, autobiographies, and sermons, Marse describes the ways slaveholders created a delusional worldview that sanctioned cruel instruments of punishment and implemented laws and social policies of domination used to rob Blacks of their human rights. The seismic shift in race relations our nation is experiencing right now makes this book timely, as it will advance our understanding of the South’s self-defeating romance with racist slavery and its latent and chronic effects. The parallels between the psychology of antebellum slaveholding and today’s racism are palpable.

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Readers’ Comments:

  • "A remarkable book: passionate and analytical, historical and personal. Be prepared to reexamine what you think you know about the United States' past and present."

    Thomas Cole, Ph.D., Librarian, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library

  • "Kirkpatrick's pairing of history with its rigorous application of forensic psychological methods is always intriguing and convincing. "

    Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History Emerita, Yale University

  • “POWERFUL; POIGNANT; EXQUISITELY DESCRIPTIVE; CONSTRUCTIVELY DISTURBING; AND, UNFORTUNATELY, REMARKABLY TIMELY."

    David A. Martindale, Ph.D., Forensic Psychologist

  • “Kirkpatrick has ranged wide in "Marse" and plunged deep."

    Dannye Romine Powell, The Charlotte Observer

  • MARSE is stunning! As our nation, and we as citizens, work to understand who we truly are and who we wish to be, it is essential that we seek, find, and see the truth about race in America. MARSE tells the truth. And, as painful as it can be at times, the truth can set us free. "

    Marvin Ventrell, NAAATP CEO