Are Racists Crazy?
How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
The connection and science behind race, racism, and mental illness
In 2012, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that - based on their clinical experiment - the beta-blocker drug, Propranolol, could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Shortly after the experiment, an article in Time Magazine cited the study, posing the question: Is racism becoming a mental illness? In Are Racists Crazy? Sander Gilman and James Thomas trace the idea of race and racism as psychopathological categories., from mid-19th century Europe, to contemporary America, up to the aforementioned clinical experiment at the University of Oxford, and ask a slightly different question than that posed by Time: How did racism become a mental illness? Using historical, archival, and content analysis, the authors provide a rich account of how the 19th century ‘Sciences of Man’ - including anthropology, medicine, and biology - used race as a means of defining psychopathology and how assertions about race and madness became embedded within disciplines that deal with mental health and illness.
An illuminating and riveting history of the discourse on racism, antisemitism, and psychopathology, Are Racists Crazy? connects past and present claims about race and racism, showing the dangerous implications of this specious line of thought for today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At a moment when race has resurfaced as an urgent part of the American discourse, Gilman (Seeing the Insane) and Thomas (Affective Labor) critically examine shifting views on race in the social sciences during the 20th century. The authors' central project is mapping the change from pathologizing race (characterizing Jewish and black people as more susceptible to mental illnesses) to pathologizing racism. They describe how some Jewish psychiatrists at the start of the 20th century accepted the argument that those of their faith were more prone to hysteria, and how asylums in the post-emancipation South tried to treat black patients by recreating the conditions of slavery. The writers locate the central switch in attitudes in the aftermath of WWII, when the world was looking to the nascent fields of social and behavioral science to explain how the people of Germany came to commit such atrocities. This coincided with the birth of the civil rights movement, and led to examinations of the mental toll racism exacts on its victims and eventually, controversially, the costs to its perpetrators. Gilman and Thomas make their case methodically, with rigorous, far-reaching scholarship. They provide no easy answers but plenty of food for thought amid America's current crisis in race relations.
