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"Deaf and dumb, blind, insane, or idiotic" were designations used in the US Census to justify eugenics, medical experimentation, and continued enslavement post emancipation.
At the same time, medical racism frequently asserted that enslaved Africans and their descendants were deemed 3/5 of a human, ergo they could not experience mental health crisis or pain.
If you dig into the 1840 and 1850 census, it's a real nasty place. Even after so-called emancipation, a white person could come to your home, declare you an idiot, and have you enslaved in a work camp or jailed.
Why are these ableist terms important for you people to keep?
I get it. Language can be hard to change. I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing the last time I used the R-slur unthinkingly. I changed because someone asked me to. Told me how it hurt them.
I changed because to stagnate is to die the worst kind of death, in my world. It's actually true that when you know better you can do better.
Let me give you a quick tour of both the pre and post emancipation intersection. All indented sections of text are direct quotes from the linked articles.
Post-emancipation, the sole care model for mentally ill Jamaicans was the Bellevue Lunatic Asylum, a vast Victorian institution built by the colonial government in 1862. Bellevue underlined and echoed the same principle of involuntary incarceration that had been a brutal hallmark of the slavery system. Among those incarcerated in desperate and deplorable conditions were political activists such as Rastafari and others displaying unusual or bizarre methods of expressing resistance to colonial apartheid.
In 1848 John Galt, a physician and medical director of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, Virginia, offered that “blacks are immune to mental illness.” Galt hypothesized that enslaved Africans could not develop mental illness because as enslaved people, they did not own property, engage in commerce, or participate in civic affairs such as voting or holding office. This immunity hypothesis assumed according to Galt and others at that time that the risk of “lunacy” would be highest in those populations who were emotionally exposed to the stress of profit making, principally wealthy white men.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, the leading medical authority in the nation during the years immediately following the American Revolution, was also the most prominent medical practitioner to disagree with John Galt’s ideas about the absence of mental illness among black slaves, when he wrote that many of the enslaved suffered from “abnormal behaviors” including “negritude,” which he described as the irrational desire by blacks to become white. Since becoming white could only be accomplished by miscegenation, Rush argued against intermarriage between races to ensure that negritude would not spread beyond the black population. While there was no indication that he ever treated anyone for this disease, he noted in one of his writings that “the Africans become insane… soon after they enter upon the toils of perpetual slavery in the West Indies.”
Other antebellum medical researchers promoted conditions such as Drapetomania, a disease that caused enslaved blacks to flee their plantations, or Dysaethesia Aethiopia, a disease that purportedly caused a state of dullness and lethargy, which would now be considered depression. Modern historians of slavery have described both conditions as understandable responses to enslavement, but white medical practitioners at the time assumed they were manifestations of mental illness.
Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a pro-slavery physician who worked with enslaved people in Louisiana, argued that severe whipping was the typically the best “treatment” for both conditions. Cartwright and others often reported that Drapetomania and Dysaethesia Aethiopia were often accompanied by skin lesions, which historians now argue were most likely scars from the whippings. In other words, these physicians failed to recognize the connection between the emotional states of the enslaved and the treatment they recommended for their condition.
There were accounts of some child-slaves being cared for in the yards of the asylums. Most of these facilities were run without government funding or oversight, and inmates, as the children were called, were regularly misdiagnosed and wrongly accused of crimes, extending their stay in these institutions and exposing them to additional mistreatment by authorities. Many of these children were subjected to hard manual labor on farms owned by or near these institutions, foreshadowing the notorious convict leasing systems that sprang up across the Reconstruction-era South.
The Civil War freed nearly four million enslaved people across the South. It did not, however, lead to more enlightened attitudes about the treatment of African Americans with mental illness. In 1895, Dr. T.O. Powell, the superintendent of the Georgia Lunatic Asylum observed an alarming increase in insanity and consumption (tuberculosis) among blacks in his state which he attributed to three decades of freedom. Powell argued that when the former slaves got their freedom, it caused them to have little or no control over their appetites and passions and thus led to excesses and vices which in turn generated a rise in insanity. Like medical experts before him, Powell did not factor in socioeconomic conditions including poverty, racial discrimination, and the ever-looming specter of violence (lynchings reached a high point in the 1890-1920 period) as playing any role in the mental state of these freedpeople.
At the beginning of the 20th century African Americans who were said to have mental deficiencies faced a new, more dangerous threat to their well-being, the eugenics movement. Starting in Great Britain, the movement quickly spread to the United States by the 1920s. Eugenics was based on two parallel principles, the encouragement of births among people who were considered “good” genetic stock, and the sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction including individuals with mental illness, those who were poor, and those accused of sexual promiscuity and sexual criminality.
September 13, 2024
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