How I Know White People are Crazy and Other Stories

This psychologist is frustrated.

In the final stretch of his doctoral internship, Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter had just one more milestone to complete: the diversity project, where candidates insert themselves into a situation in which they’d experience what it’s like to be a minority. Surprisingly, the all-white training committee failed him! They concluded that the only Black intern did not understand diversity. Frustrated and panicked, he thought: “These white people are crazy.”

In How I Know White People Are Crazy and Other Stories, Dr. Lassiter pulls back the curtain on the mental health system and reveals the hurdles that Black psychologists and students are forced to endure in the field. He tackles how white ideology has harmed Black patients and how it dominates America’s mental health practices. As a Black gay man working as a psychologist under culturally insensitive supervisors and colleagues in America, he grows more frustrated with the exclusive talk of Sigmund Freud, and the narrowness of psychology study, with no one like him to vent to. All this takes a mental and physical toll on him.
 
Using his expertise in research, his own therapy, and keeping a healthy dose of hip-hop/R&B music in his ears, Dr. Lassiter discovered a way where we can center culture in our healing. Through a series of essays, he demands that the lived and cultural experiences of people of color, LGBTQ+, and disabled communities are made a part of psychology practices so that we can understand, live in, and navigate this frustrating world.

​This thought provoking, funny, and searing indictment of the mental health system for patients, students, and professionals alike will leave you thinking differently about the psychologists in your life.

• "Phewwwww, this book!!! Damn every white person needs to read it."
  Dr. Courtney Tracy, author of Your Unconscious is Showing
• "Pulling from his lived experience and his work as a psychologist, Lassiter breaks down how 'whiteness' operates as a mindset built on division and control. This bold and necessary book challenges us to name it, undo it, and begin the real work of healing. It’s a call toward collective liberation."
  Clay Cane, New York Times bestselling author of The Grift
• "Dr. Lassiter's fierce, funny, and furious diagnosis has changed how I think about the ways whiteness shapes the world—and myself. This book about the head is bursting with heart and we learn as we watch him attempting to navigate a world whose framework is founded on the often absurd propositions of whiteness."
  Baynard Woods, author of Inheritance
• "During a time of racial disinformation and bigotry, Dr. Lassiter's book unpacks this crisis on a psychological and scholarly level. Both insightful and personal, his provocative writing pushes past the dated trope of being another 'Dear White People' reaction—but an empowering literary embodiment of Black resilience that's timely and necessary."
  Ernest Owens, author of The Case for Cancel Culture
• "This is the best book I’ve read in a long time. It’s so good I wish I had written it. It corroborates the crazy-making experiences of Black Americans that are too often denied or dismissed as over sensitivity by the white power structure and offers strategies for surviving and thriving in an inhospitable world. Every conscientious American should read Dr. Lassiter’s brilliant book."
   
  Dr. Carl Hart, author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups
• "Dr. Lassiter is prolific in his teachings and writings, as he honors those who are often overlooked by the majority!!! I am super excited for the world to have a first-row seat in learning how he manages his frustrations in a quest to de-center whiteness, so ALL can live optimally as their full authentic selves."
  Dr. Ayana Jordan, Barbara Wilson Associate Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine
• "This book is what we’ve been waiting for. It's a must-read. Dr. Lassiter takes us on a necessary emotional roller coaster as he navigates becoming a prolific Black psychologist in a sea of whiteness. Providing readers a diagnostic of 'whiteness' finally gives us the language to describe that which we’ve known for so long as simply 'crazy' behavior. How I Know White People are Crazy and Other Stories is a balm, a testament, a cauldron of healing, stories for that which has plagued us for so long in this society."
  Sharrell D. Luckett, PhD, author of Black Acting Methods