How Psychiatry Creates Racism Cont.

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Evolving Scientific Racism

In 1869, the term “eugenics” was first used by British psychologist Francis Galton. The term came from the Greek eugenes, meaning “good in stock.” To “improve” the race, he encouraged “better” human stock to breed and discouraged “less desirable” stock having children. Eugenics claimed that “immigrants from Italy, Greece, Hungary, and other Southeastern countries” carried a germ that made them “more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality.”

In 1879, German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig University declared that as man’s soul could not be measured with scientific instruments, it did not exist. Man suddenly became merely another animal. Stripped of his soul, he could be manipulated as easily as a dog could be trained to salivate at the sound of a bell. This rationale suited Wundt’s military masters at the time.

Such “scientific” rationales were used to justify the practice of slavery in the U.S. In 1797, psychiatrist Benjamin Rush—whose face still adorns the seal of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) today—declared that the color of blacks was caused by a rare, inherited disease called “Negritude” which derived from leprosy. Rush said that the only evidence of a “cure” was when the skin color turned white. The “disease” label was used as a reason for segregation.

In 1851, Samuel A. Cartwright, a prominent Louisiana physician, claimed to have discovered two mental diseases peculiar to blacks, which he believed justified their enslavement. These were called Drapetomania and Dysaesthesia Aethiopis. Dr. Thomas Szasz says, “The first term came from drapetes, a runaway slave, and mania, meaning mad or crazy. Cartwright claimed that this ‘disease’ caused blacks to have an uncontrollable urge to run away from their ‘masters.’ The ‘treatment’ for this ‘illness’ was ‘whipping the devil out of them.’”

Dyasethesia Aethiopis supposedly affected both mind and body. The symptoms included disobedience, answering disrespectfully and refusing to work. The “cure” was hard labor!

In 1918, American eugenics advocate, Dr. Paul Popenoe arrogantly proclaimed that the IQ of blacks was determined by the amount of “white blood” in them. The lighter skinned the blacks the higher their IQ, and the blacker he was, the lower the IQ.

Similar theories have persisted. In the 1950s, an “expert” in IQ testing, psychologist Lewis Terman, claimed that poor children could never be educated, and that Mexicans, Indians and blacks “should never be allowed to reproduce.” Such tests were used to stop Italians, Poles, Mexicans, and others from moving to the United States and “tainting” American blood.

Even as recently as 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s book The Bell Curve, still claimed that African Americans and Latinos do worse than whites in intelligence tests, are “genetically disabled” and therefore cannot cope with the demands of modern society.

Through invented “diseases” and such bogus concepts as “lower IQ” and “racial inferiority,” psychiatry has not only legitimized 20th and 21st century racism, but created outright genocide.