Black History: Special Delivery!!
Dr. Benjamin Rush is known as the “Father Of American Psychiatry”. He was also an abolitionist. Rush believed that blacks suffered from a disorder he called “Negritude” due then having dark skin. He described this condition as being akin to leprosy. The only cure for the condition was to become white.
Dr. Rush sited the case of Henry Moss, a slave who lost his dark skin color (probably through vitigulo), to support his claim of Negritude being a medical condition. He thought being black was a curable skin disease. Rush wrote that “Whites should not tyrannize over [blacks], for their disease should entitle them to a double portion of humanity. However, by the same token, whites should not intermarry with them, for this would tend to infect posterity with the ‘disorder’… attempts must be made to cure the disease.”
Some of our Black Mail readers may remember our previous post about “Drapetomania”, a condition used to that characterized the desire of slaves to run away and seek freedom as an illness.
Scientific racism is institutional and systemic. It exists today.
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December 24, 2015 at 10:54 pm
Sad. Some of us still suffer from “negritude.” We try to attain whiteness in every area of our lives: social, psychological, educational, etc. smh
December 25, 2015 at 12:19 am
So true!
January 17, 2018 at 10:29 pm
writing an article about this in the context of white Christians of the past and now
January 18, 2018 at 12:04 pm
Awesome! Writing about the subject in its current context would be a fascinating read.
May 20, 2020 at 1:27 pm
But there’s often a failure to recognise that much of Fanon’s seminal thinking stemmed from his experiences working with mental illness in North Africa as a psychiatrist. It’s in these early experiences that we see many of his most revered ideas being incubated, only to become consolidated in his later texts. Fanon was influenced by writings from Negritude, Marxism, psychoanalysis and the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. It is in his critique of colonial psychiatry in the Maghreb that Fanon’s conceptual clarity emerges with a robustness that has remained influential for over five decades.