Elaine Pinderhughes Lifetime Achievement Award

Dick Chasin

It has been AFTA's honor to have had Elaine Pinderhughes in our midst from the beginning and among our leadership for the past decade. This June, we will acknowledge our deep appreciation for her by giving her our Lifetime Achievement Award.

Her accomplishments include all the arenas valued by AFTA.

She is a master teacher. During the past quarter century, she has delivered twenty different courses to master's degree and doctoral students in social work. Her academic base has been at the Boston College School of Social Work, where she is now Professor Emerita. She has held several visiting professorships, notably, the Lydia Rapoport Professorship at Smith; the Lucille Austin Professorship at Columbia; and the Moses Professorship at Hunter.

She is an exemplary scholar. Her forty publications are broadly important, thoroughly researched, tightly reasoned, and written with exceptional clarity.

She is an inspired leader. She has served on committees and boards ranging from the Publication Committee of the National Association of Social Workers to the Board of Overseers of Boston's Museum of Science. During 1991—1992, she was President of the American Association of Orthopsychiatry. She has served on AFTA's Board. One reason that she has not received an AFTA award sooner is that she served on, or chaired, our Awards Committee through much of the past decade!

What makes Elaine so precious, perhaps indispensable, is that her intelligence, her industry, her determination, her warmth, her charm—all these gifts—have been guided by her passion for social justice and for the validity, integrity and agency of every person. She has the mind, character, and vision that families and family therapists have needed most during the last four decades of the twentieth century—and still need today.

Elaine stands tall among family therapists who are concerned with the interplay of social divisions and family struggles. Her career began in the early days of the American civil rights movement and continues now at a time when the work of that movement remains so sadly incomplete, a time when we are increasingly aware that civil rights are the exception, not the rule, all over the globe.

Elaine's writings testify that she is devoted to unearthing the roots of bias and to blazing pathways to empowerment. The subjects of her articles and book chapters include the legacy of slavery; Black genealogy; biracial identity; racism, ethnocentrism, and classism; minority women; populations at risk; Black middle class families; and empathy in cross-cultural work. Her book, Understanding Race, Ethnicity, and Power: The Key to Efficacy in Clinical Practice, is a classic.

No one who knows her family story is at all surprised that she has focused her talents on these matters. She and her family span almost every divide that she has sought to understand and illuminate throughout her career. Elaine came from a middle-class, African-American family, where she was the confidante of her beautiful, light-skinned, and "unaccountably" sad mother, who died when Elaine was 16.

She attended the legendary Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, graduated summa cum laude from Howard University, and received  her MSW from Columbia University School of Social Work.  Her late husband Charles Pinderhughes—like her father—was a strong, dark-skinned, well-educated professional. After graduating from Dartmouth College and Howard University Medical School (where he met Elaine), Charles became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

In the 1950s, these two recently-married, outstanding young professionals were excluded from buying a house in Cambridge. Instead they settled in Roxbury, where they raised their five children, three of whom they sent to an elite, private elementary  school in Cambridge to assure that they received the highest level of education available in the Boston area. In the 1960s, when many other professional Black families began to move to the now-available suburbs, the Pinderhughes family loyally remained in Roxbury and became leaders in that predominantly-Black, inner city community.

It was in Roxbury that I first met Elaine, in 1969 when we simultaneously took key positions at the James Jackson Putnam Children's Center, a clinic for pre-school children. She was head of social work and I was executive director. It was not a quiet time in the ghetto. Elaine and I struggled against and for each other. We learned a lot about Black and White and a lot about each other. The mutual respect forged in that crucible matured into a professional and personal relationship that has endured for over thirty years.

Although we both left the clinic in the early 1970's, we have crossed paths at critical points in our professional journeys.

We taught a few diversity workshops together. Later, Elaine separately developed her remarkable method of teaching about ethnicity. She begins by asking participants when they first realized that other families were "different." She carefully and expeditiously establishes that everyone has "ethnicity" and everyone struggles over identity and privilege. With a heart that conveys unstinting acceptance of human frailty, she enables each participant to uncover and face the attitudes they have about their own identity and the identity of others.

When Elaine was researching and exploring her Black origins back to the eighteenth century and her White origins even farther back, I directed her in psychodramatic representations of pivotal episodes in her family history, including the horrific slave-day origins of light-skin in the blood line of her depressed mother.

We also worked together leading a group of couples who had adopted VietNamese war orphans. We endeavored to support their courage and love as they grappled with the mysteries and agonies of raising displaced, traumatized, mixed-race children.

These collaborations gave me a first-hand view of Elaine's pedagogic and therapeutic skills. Although she is a master of the influence of context on behavior, she herself seems to be the same person regardless of context. The words of praise on the dust jacket of Understanding Race, Ethnicity, and Power could as well stand in tribute to the woman herself. Price Cobbs said the book is both "powerful" and "subtle"; Monica McGoldrick called it "hardhitting" and "touching"; Carolyn Attneave saw the author as unafraid and non-judgmental; Harry Aponte marveled that the writer "managed to be both bold and even-handed."

Elaine Pinderhughes brings a rainbow of excellence to the classroom, the board room, the consulting room, the living room-everywhere she goes. No chameleon, she is true to her colors and brings out the true colors of each human space she enters. She is a role model for people of color: Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, and White.

We are honored to honor her lifetime of achievement.

Dick Chasin is a psychiatrist and family therapist in Cambridge, Mass. He was President of AFTA from 1993—1995 and is currently a Senior Associate of the Public Conversations Project in Watertown, Mass.