Colin Sheridan: How a Harlem-born intellectual influenced a generation in Ireland through television
Pioneering social psychologist Dr Alvin Poussaint.
This weekend in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a memorial will be held for Dr Alvin F Poussaint, who died late last month at the grand old age of 90.
You’ve likely never heard of Dr Poussaint, but, assuming you had a television growing up in Ireland, you most certainly came across his work. Poussaint was a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and his work as a psychiatrist, medical professional, writer, civil rights activist, and public intellectual was seminal in how Americans — especially African Americans — thought about race, class, and justice.
As an academic, he was credited with expanding the enrollment of black and Hispanic medical students at Harvard over the course of four decades, encouraging and mentoring them. As an activist, he served as the southern field director of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, a group that pushed to desegregate medical facilities and provided training for civil rights workers when race relations in the South were at their most incendiary.
As a provocative thinker, he challenged conventional wisdom on the effect of racism on both the racist, and the subjects of their racism, going further than most by examining the awkward space between white supporters of the civil rights movement, and their black comrades. As many of us navigate a similar space regarding advocacy for the Palestinian cause from the safety of our homes, there is much we could learn from his findings.
Arguably his most profound influence on contemporary culture — in Ireland at any rate — came through his work as a consultant on The Cosby Show, the hugely popular sit-com which starred pre-disgraced Bill Cosby as Dr Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, the father of an upper-middle-class black family in Brooklyn, New York.
Such was his influence on the show, many credited Poussaint as being the direct inspiration for Huxtable, a theory he always dismissed. While it seems absurd to think it now, Cosby’s portrayal of Huxtable — alongside his on-screen wife Phylicia Rashad’s depiction of a successful, black lawyer — were immensely formative in shaping societal perceptions of black people in America, especially in a white-controlled media.
It’s worth remembering that the last recorded “lynching” in the US occurred as late as 1981, just five years before first aired. Poussaint — who had marched from Selma to Montgomery with a briefcase full of medical supplies — had seen the worst of it.
Through his work on , for which he analysed every script, he sought to challenge white attitudes to black problems, and black people's perceptions of themselves, especially in the context of succeeding in society.
As a kid growing up in the West of Ireland in the late 1980’s, I can still remember individual episodes of The Cosby Show. I can recall in vivid detail critical plot-points and teaching moments. I could never give myself enough credit to believe it was the subtlety of Poussaint’s thinking that drew me in — the show, after all, was very funny — but as a white Irish child in a community whose most exotic member was a bald lad from Tyrone — the lessons buried deep within that show consistently landed, so much so that by the time I spread my little wings and flew the nest I was much more attuned to my own ignorance, and the complex lives of others. I think the same is true for those who grew up watching The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
I had the honour of meeting Alvin Poussaint once, though our meeting was in an intimate, family setting, and unrelated to his intellectual prowess, and — while memorable to me — will hardly make the highlight reel at his memorial.
It is, though, quite incredible to imagine just how small our worlds can be. How does it come to pass that this son of East Harlem, born to West Indian immigrants in 1934 New York, beats the considerable odds to become one of the preeminent thinkers on race, particularly as it pertains to mental health, and that his message somehow transcends every social boundary to land in one of the whitest places in the world, namely, Balla, Co Mayo in 1988?
The only certainty that comes from his passing is that, regardless of our skin colour, race, background or education, we should all read more. Me included.
The wealth of knowledge and critical thinking that is available — much of it for free — is almost infinite, and given these times of deep perilous division we find ourselves in, living in an increasingly multicultural Ireland, the wisdom that thinkers such as Alvin Poussaint can impart — even post mortem — is so much more beneficial to us than a three minute clip on social media delivered by a self-appointed spokesperson for the toxic issue of the day.
As the saying goes, small minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas. We have never been more in need of ideas. We just might find the best ones have already been written down. We just need to read them.
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