Martin Summers is an Associate Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College.
His research and teaching interests center on race, gender, and sexuality in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States.
"Racial Narratives of Insanity, the African American Medical
Profession, and the Politics of Mental Illness, 1890-1945"
Beginning
in the 1840s and lasting well into the twentieth century, white
American physicians and psychiatrists constructed racialized
narratives about black mental health and mental illness. The
conventional wisdom that “primitive” peoples were relatively
immune to mental illness, for instance, fit neatly with paternalist
conceptions of slavery as a benevolent institution to explain
the supposed low rates of insanity among enslaved blacks. In
the post-emancipation period, physicians pointed to increased
incidence of insanity—along with diseases such as tuberculosis
and syphilis—as evidence that African Americans were ill-equipped
to deal with freedom and were, in fact, on the verge of racial
extinction. From the late-nineteenth century through at least
the first third of the twentieth, the psychiatric consensus
was that black “madness” was qualitatively different from—indeed, inferior to—white “madness.” For example, the belief
that mental illness in African Americans tended to manifest
in manias and their attendant forms of violence—sexual assault,
homicide, and so forth—contributed to, and reinforced, academic,
popular cultural, and state discourses about black criminality.
While this
dimension of psychiatric discourse has been explored by historians, there has
been little attention paid to how the African American medical and academic
communities engaged these racialized narratives or understood mental illness
and mental health more broadly. Even as black physicians and social scientists
robustly disputed theories of racial degeneration being advanced by segments
of the white scientific and medical establishment in the late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth centuries, they rarely addressed the issue of mental illness
directly. Indeed, there was little discussion of mental illness in the medical,
public health, and social science literature produced by African Americans
before the 1930s and 1940s. This paper asks the question: Why did mental illness
fail to elicit any substantial discussion within black medical and academic
communities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries? It will consider
a number of factors—including culture, class and professional formation,
and the politics of public health and health activism—that were potentially
contributory to the lack of competing narratives of black mental illness and
mental health. In doing so, the paper will also consider the extent to which
the absence of counternarratives has contributed to the persistence of an overall
problematic relationship between African Americans and mental health practitioners
(for example, the continued reluctance of blacks to seek treatment; the overdiagnosis
of schizophrenia and the underdiagnosis of depression among African Americans;
and the underrepresentation of blacks in outpatient services and the overrepresentation
of blacks in inpatient, institutionalized settings).
This topic will be presented on Friday, April 17th at 10:15 a.m. as part of the Panel I discussion "Race, Otherness and the Body."
"Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity," 1900–1930, University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
“Diasporic Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transnational Production of Black Middle-Class Masculinity,” in Gender and History 15:3, 2004.
"'This Immoral Practice': The Prehistory of Homophobia in Black Nationalist Thought," in Gender Nonconformity, Race and Sexuality: Charting the Connections," edited by Toni Lester, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
