![]() ![]() My great-grandfather on my dad’s side had died in Bryce’s Hospital, which was the state hospital in Alabama. In addition to this childhood preoccupation, use of family material is a point of departure. It was challenging, but I was very excited by having to be on that steep learning curve. I also moved away from Alabama, and I moved away from a first-person narrative, to tell a larger story in which I was mainly located as the voice and the analysis. So I turned from the question of the “therapist telling us to read history” to the history of therapy or psychiatry and a kind of meta-discourse on these questions. In what was my most notable book, Memoir of a Race Traitor, I talked about the relationship between the intimate and the historic, and asked, “what therapist would tell us to read history?” I had tried to combine my narratives of anti-Klan work with memories of growing up as a child in Alabama and reflections on my family. So that’s one of the things I brought into it: looking at racism with its complications of misogyny, homophobia, heterosexism, sex and gender systems, capitalism-all those forces and vectors. was of delayed action in sorting it through, but I really have been sorting it through for the rest of my life. At 13, 14, 15, I think I was really primed to try to be that observer. that seemed to be surfacing the violence in the culture, and that in a way that made white people have to think about it. I remember being very confused about my culture and my family, as it was contradicted by the forces that I saw sometimes in my front yard and on the steps of my church and in my school. In terms of intertwined personal and political motivations, first was my continuing personal and political preoccupation with white supremacy, having been born in Alabama in 1949 and grown up in a conservative white family in the midst of a civil rights revolution by Black people. I’m really happy about that because that was a necessary thing to do. People are telling me that I have done that. The story of the South is also the story of “America” with an acute lens of race. At some point, I realized that the story of the Georgia Asylum was the story of the South, which is such an epic story of white supremacy with a revolution and a counter-revolution every couple of decades. I really was determined to have a narrative that could carry along all the details that I had found in the people and their stories, in a way that was a sweeping history. Mab Segrest: I’d love to do that, but thank you very much first for thinking it’s a sweeping, stunning account because it took me a long time to do. Tell us about some of the personal and political motivations that you have for writing this book. Leah Harris: You have written such a sweeping, stunning, anti-racist account of asylum history. Listen to the audio of the interview here. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. A long time activist in social justice movements and a past fellow at the National Humanities Center, she lives in Durham, North Carolina. M ab segrest is Professor Emeritus of Gender and Women’s Studies at Connecticut College and the author of Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum, and Memoir of a Race Traitor, both from the New Press.
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