Contempt and Pity

“Provides a thought-provoking, new history of how the ‘experts’ have ‘depicted the personalities of black folk.' ” — American Historical Review

“[A] wide-ranging history of how liberals as well as conservatives have used 'damage imagery' and the language of pathology to further their political aims for the black community.” — Chronicle of Higher Education

“[An] impressive and important book. . . . Scott’s chapter on Brown is a brilliant treatment of how good intentions can have perverse consequences.” — Alan Wolfe, New Republic

“A consequential study that breaks new ground. . . . Scott argues that the liberal view that African Americans go through life with a damaged psyche, and the conservative disdain toward people of color, have served to subject blacks to a dead-end cycle of pity and contempt.” — CHOICE

“Scholars interested in the intellectual history of the social scientific professions, in the history of racial representations, and in the pervasive question of damage in black history will find Scott’s scholarship thoughtful and insightful.” — Journal of Southern History

“Masterful and frequently iconoclastic analyses of the ebb and flow of pejorative images used to judge changing designs for identity and status of American blacks. Courageous, hard-hitting descriptions of how and when importunings, demands, and expectations — as well as often ambiguous grantings — of respect and conclusion have been constructed, labeled, and manipulated — both wittingly and unwittingly — with important policy consequences and implications.” — Hylan Lewis, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

“Daryl Scott’s fascinating study investigates the uses of 'damage imagery' in debates about African American culture among social scientists and advocates throughout the twentieth century. Scott’s fresh and original analysis uncovers ironies, contradictions, and unintended consequences of the arguments about black 'pathologies' offered by liberal, radical, and conservative intellectuals.” — Walter A. Jackson, author of Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987

“Scott has written an utterly pathbreaking book. In tracing the history of the idea of damage/pathology as it was utilized in social scientific discourse to refer to black Americans, Scott has been able to enter numerous, highly significant debates in Afro-American and American intellectual history. Provocative even when wrong, Scott will rattle the foundations of numerous arguments that heretofore have been accepted as everyday truth.” — Jerry Gafio Watts, author of Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life

“Daryl Scott has crafted a brilliant analysis of the ways in which ideology, the broader culture, and surprisingly, history itself temper the findings and use of social science. It is the story of liberal experts who came to depict the black psyche as damaged by racial discrimination. Scott undermines the foundation of prevailing interpretations of the intellectual origins of the modern civil rights movement: the triumph of 'therapeutic culture,' not Myrdal’s moral appeal, powered the movement, starting with the Supreme Court’s famous social science footnote.” — Brian Balogh, University of Virginia