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<h1 id="reader-title">Black Protest, White Backlash, and the
History of Scientific Racism</h1>
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<h6><strong>Co-Authored by Christopher Petrella and Justin
Gomer - October 5, 2016<br>
</strong></h6>
<p><em>“Mainstream culture…defines threats to racial order
as a form of madness that is, still, overwhelmingly
located in the minds and bodies of black [people].”
–Jonathan Metzl</em></p>
<p>On September 28th, television host Bill Maher tweeted
that “<a
href="http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/real-time/Bill-Maher-Colin-Kaepernick-is-a-f-------idiot-.html"
target="_blank">#colinkapernick [sic] is a f**king
idiot</a>” after the 49ers quarterback voiced his
disappointment with both <a
href="http://www.aaihs.org/whats-missing-from-black-counternarratives-to-donald-trump/">Donald
Trump</a> and Hillary Clinton on the basis that their
campaigns are “<a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/us/colin-kaepernick-says-presidential-candidates-were-trying-to-debate-whos-less-racist.html"
target="_blank">trying to debate who is less racist</a>.”
Maher’s choice of invective has proven popular among
those who disapprove of Colin Kaepernick’s <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/sports/football/colin-kaepernick-monday-night-national-anthem.html"
target="_blank">critique of white supremacy</a>.</p>
<p>Delegitimizing black protest by labeling its
expressions as “idiocy” is not new. Since the very
invention of the ideology of race, white people have
struggled to accept black social protest on its own
terms. Instead, white people have often marshaled the
language of science to attribute black resistance to
various forms of derangement, stupidity, and psychosis
in an effort to delegitimize its critique of white
supremacy. In fact, the endurance of white supremacy
rests in its ability to construct, define, and police
the boundaries of black pathology in the very moments in
which it perceives deep challenges to its stability and
legitimacy. When black protest threatens white
supremacy, white “science” steps in.</p>
<p>The history of pathologizing black resistance to white
oppression has its roots in the practice of U.S.
slavery. Nineteenth century medical diagnoses, for
instance, often reflected white slave-holding interests
in the context of black protest and revolt. In 1851,
Samuel A. Cartwright, a New Orleans physician and
Confederate loyalist, published his “<a
href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3106t.html"
target="_blank">Report on the Disease and the Physical
Peculiarities of the Negro Race</a>” in which he
argued that high rates of physical and mental illnesses
afflicting black persons were products of the supposed
biologically inferior mental capacity of the “black
race.”</p>
<p>In this report, Cartwright introduced what he called
“Drapetomania,” known as the “Disease Causing Slaves to
Run Away.” He claimed that Drapetomania was curable
except in “slaves [who are] located on the borders of a
free State, within a stone’s throw of the
abolitionists.” Interestingly, Cartwright offered no
explanation as to why these particular enslaved black
communities could not be “cured” of their “mental
“illness” and thereby continued to flee northward toward
freedom. While “kindness”—keeping one’s property
well-fed, clothed, providing enough fuel to keep the
enslaved warm at night, and so forth—was the prescribed
antidote to the “disease,” Cartwright nonetheless warned
that “if any one or more of them, at any time, are
inclined to raise their heads to a level with their
master or overseer…they should be punished until they
fall into [a] submissive state….’” Cartwright, in other
words, viewed Drapetomania as a mental “illness” that
could be beaten out of those who resisted enslavement.</p>
<p>In the immediate aftermath of slavery, everyone from
physicians to scholars and politicians sought to explain
the supposed high-rates of diseases, most notably
tuberculosis, among black communities. According to <a
href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/to-joy-my-freedom-southern-black-womens-lives-and-labors-after-the-civil-war/oclc/36024077&referer=brief_results"
target="_blank">historian Tera Hunter</a>, “Race
handicapped affluent blacks because they could not
withstand the excessive ‘mental strain’ necessary to
emulate the ‘higher degree of civilization’ and good
health of ‘the better class of their white neighbors.’”
The “diseases” of black communities were therefore the
black bodies physically breaking down because they could
not handle the responsibilities of freedom.</p>
<p>In the early twentieth century, black resistance was
described as disease through the eugenics discourse of
idiocy. Terms such as “idiot” and “moron” emerged to
classify those unfit for civic life and to justify
deportation, institutionalization, or sterilization.
Both terms were used to police the project of white
(Anglo, Nordic) race preservation.</p>
<p>The terms “idiot” and “moron” entered into our nation’s
lexicon in 1910. At the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded, held in
May of that year, racial eugenicist <a
href="http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/02/10/267561895/it-took-a-eugenicist-to-come-up-with-moron"
target="_blank">Henry Goddard</a> proposed a taxonomic
system—“idiot-imbecile-moron”—for classifying
individuals with “mental retardation” based on an
intelligence quotient (IQ). Goddard ascribed the term
“idiot” to those with a mental age of less than three
years. Moreover, he applied the term “imbecile” to those
with a mental age of 3 to 7. A “moron,” in Goddard’s
estimation, was best reserved for those with a mental
age of 7 to 10. All three terms fell under the broad
category of “feeble-mindedness.” Goddard’s typology also
corresponded with precise IQ ranges:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>0-29 = idiot</p>
<p>30-49 = imbecile</p>
<p>50-69 = moron</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In 1917, Goddard was tapped to serve on the U.S. Army’s
Alpha and Beta Testing Team, a research body that
conducted intelligence tests on over 1.7 million
soldiers. A few years later, Goddard and his team
published the results in their book,<a
href="https://books.google.com/books?id=YIH7DBtwZOkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false"
target="_blank"> <em>Psychology Examining in the
United States Army</em></a>. Whereas Goddard and his
cohort found that 47 percent of whites from southern and
eastern European countries could be classified as
morons, they alleged that 89 percent of black soldiers
fell into the same category.</p>
<p>But the timing of the report’s publication is curious
especially given the prominent role black veterans
played in resisting white lynch mob violence in the
immediate aftermath of the war. In 1919, whites who were
upset by black migration from the rural south to the
urban north began a <a
href="http://www.aaihs.org/ida-b-wells-police-violence-and-the-legacy-of-lynching/"
target="_blank">lynching campaign</a> of near-historic
proportions. According to the Library of Congress, at
least 76 black Americans were lynched that year alone.</p>
<p>In the war’s immediate aftermath black veterans were
often at the forefront of these violent confrontations.
During the bloody “<a
href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_red.html"
target="_blank">Red Summer</a>” of 1919 in Chicago,
Washington D.C., and Elaine, Arkansas and again three
years later in Tulsa, Oklahoma demobilized black
veterans used their combat experience and tactical and
organizational knowledge to resist oppression in their
communities. Alleging that 89 percent of black
soldiers—and therefore black veterans—were morons, one
can argue, served as a way of undermining their
resistance to lynch mobs and the destruction of black
communities.</p>
<p>The delegitimization of black protest was again on
display in 1968 at the height of the Black Power era
when eminent psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Frank
Simon dreamed up a diagnosis—“protest psychosis”—that
described Black power as a form of “delusional
anti-whiteness.” Four years later, in “<a
href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/symbolism-in-a-protest-psychosis/oclc/102899286&referer=brief_results"
target="_blank">Symbolism in Protest Psychosis</a>,”
they forcefully described that malady as “a psychotic
illness with strong elements of racial hostility and
black nationalism [that entails] the release of
previously repressed anti-white feelings, which combine
with African ideology and beliefs.” In short, “[the
illness is oriented toward] reversing the white
supremacy tradition or stating an objection to the
accepted superiority of white values in terms of an
African ideology.”</p>
<p>During the same period, and in keeping with Bromberg
and Simon’s thesis, the idea of schizophrenia shifted
from a condition historically associated with “white
feminine docility” to that of “angry black masculinity.”
In his compelling text, <a
href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/protest-psychosis-how-schizophrenia-became-a-black-disease/oclc/319496892&referer=brief_results"
target="_blank"><em>The Protest Psychosis: How
Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease</em></a>, Dr.
Johnathan Metzl demonstrated how schizophrenia’s new
clinical parameters were signaled in the second edition
of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM) published in 1968. Schizophrenia, he <a
href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/protest-psychosis-how-schizophrenia-became-a-black-disease/oclc/319496892&referer=brief_results"
target="_blank">argued</a>, was reorganized as a
“disorder of masculinized belligerence” through the
language of hostility and aggression. According to <a
href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/protest-psychosis-how-schizophrenia-became-a-black-disease/oclc/319496892&referer=brief_results"
target="_blank">Metzl</a>, the diagnosis “mirrored the
social context of its origins in ways that enabled users
to knowingly or unknowingly pathologize protest as
mental illness [or cognitive deficiency].”</p>
<p>Contemporary attempts to delegitimize black protest as
“idiocy” reflects the scientific discourse of pathology
that has been <a
href="http://apa.nyu.edu/hauntedfiles/about/timeline/"
target="_blank">evident in white critiques of black
resistance for decades</a>. Arguing that black protest
is grounded in derangement, stupidity, and psychosis is
precisely what allows white people to sidestep the
actual content of black activists’ demands.</p>
<p>Perhaps we can begin to understand and to respect black
resistance by affirming that Colin Kaepernick is not an
idiot; that black veterans fighting lynch mobs were not
morons; that enslaved men and women who ran away were
not diseased; and that the unwavering demand to be
regarded as “fully human” in the eyes of the state does
not signal a psychotic break. To the contrary, black
protest, in all its forms, fundamentally challenges
white supremacy and affirms blackness as fundamental to
the fabric of our democratic society in the making.</p>
<hr>
<p><a href="http://www.christopherfrancispetrella.net/"
target="_blank"><strong>Christopher Petrella</strong></a>
is a Lecturer in American Cultural Studies at Bates
College. His work explores the intersections of race,
state, and criminalization. He completed a Ph.D. in
African Diaspora Studies from the University of
California, Berkeley. Follow him on Twitter <a
class="ProfileHeaderCard-screennameLink u-linkComplex
js-nav" href="https://twitter.com/CFPetrella">@<span
class="u-linkComplex-target">CFPetrella</span></a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://csulb.academia.edu/JustinGomer/"
target="_blank"><strong>Justin Gomer</strong> </a>is
an Assistant Professor of American Studies at California
State University, Long Beach. His work centers on race
and representation in the post-civil rights era. He
completed a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the
University of California, Berkeley.</p>
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