IMPORTANT FACTS

1. For centuries, psychiatry and psychology have provided the “scientific” justification for racism.

2. The emergence of racism was certain to happen considering the basic philosophies that govern the psychiatric and psychological professions. The first is the “survival of the fittest” principle, which underlies the psychiatric eugenics (racial “improvement”) movement; the other is the psychiatric idea that man is merely an animal. Together they form a mentality that breeds anti-social theories and attitudes, including racist ones.

3. In 1883, British psychologist Francis Galton created the term “eugenics,” from the Greek word eugenes , meaning “good stock,” and defined certain racial groups as “inferior.”

4. Through their history of invented racial “diseases,” psychiatry and psychology have not only legitimized modern racism, but also provided the justification for outright genocide.

CHAPTER ONE The History of ‘Scientific’ Racism

Whipping the devil out of them,” was the recommended “treatment” for a mental “disorder” called drapetomania [from drapetes, a runaway slave and mania, meaning crazy], which meant a slave had the unnatural urge to run away. It was “discovered” in Louisiana in 1851.

The statements in this chapter are shocking, but they illustrate the development of an outrageous theory that is now taken as “fact.”

For centuries, psychiatry and psychology have provided the “scientific” justification for racism and the resultant abuse, assault and genocide of targeted races and groups.

In 1883, Francis Galton, an English psychologist, created the term “eugenics” from the Greek word, eugenes, meaning “good stock.” He encouraged using “better” human stock from which to breed, and discouraged what he considered “less desirable” stock from having children, evidently considering himself part of the “better” stock and thereby capable of judging the future for all humanity.

Galton considered Africans inferior. After spending two years in Africa, he wrote a book entitled Tropical South Africa. Of the people he met he wrote: “These savages court [ask for] slavery. … They have no independence about them, generally speaking, but follow a master as a spaniel would.” He left no doubt about his beliefs when he said, “The average intellectual standard of the Negro is some two grades below our own.”

Humans, Galton determined, were decidedly unequal. Ideas that men were of “equal value,” he said, were simply “undeniably wrong and cannot last.” Any charity to the poor and ill, he wrote, should be conditional upon their agreeing to abstain from producing offspring.

Galton’s well-known half-cousin Charles Darwin, also a psychologist, promoted this too: “No one who has attended the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man … hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

Nazi psychiatrists and America’s mental health movement would later adopt these ideas just as readily, but they were initially used to justify slavery and then to control immigration. In accordance with eugenics theory, “Immigrants from Italy, Greece, Hungary, and other southeastern countries” were seen as not making the grade, because they carried a germ that made them “more given to crimes of larceny [theft], kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality.”

But such “scientific” rationale had long been used to justify the degradation of Blacks in the United States. In 1797, psychiatrist Benjamin Rush, the “father of American psychiatry,” 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. This “disease” was used as a reason for segregation, so that Whites would not be “infected.”

Author Robert Whitaker tells us, “During the 19th century, the perceived mental health of African- Americans was closely tied to their legal status as free men or slaves. Those who lived in free states, or those who were slaves and publicly exhibited a desire to be free, were at particular risk of being seen as insane.”

According to the 1840 U.S. census, insanity was 11 times more common among Negroes living in the North than those in the South. The result was quickly shown to be absurd, but not before Southern politicians had seized upon it as evidence that “bondage (slavery) was good for Negroes,” reported Whitaker.

“Here is proof of the necessity of slavery,” reasoned Senator John Calhoun. “The African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom. It is a mercy to give him guardianship and protection from mental death.”

In 1851, Samuel A. Cartwright, a prominent, white, Louisiana eugenics physician, claimed to have discovered two mental diseases peculiar to blacks which justified their enslavement. One was the already mentioned drapetomania, and the other he called dysaesthesia aethiopis. Dr. Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry emeritus and CCHR’s co-founder, wrote, “Cartwright claimed that this ‘disease’[drapetomania] caused Blacks to have an uncontrollable urge to run away from their ‘masters.’ As covered earlier, Cartwright’s recommended ‘treatment’ for this ‘illness’ was ‘whipping the devil out of them.’”

Dysaesthesia aethiopis [impaired sensation] supposedly affected both mind and body of Blacks. The symptoms included disobedience, answering disrespectfully and refusing to work. The “cure” was hard labor. Cartwright claimed, “The compulsory power of the white man, by making the slothful [idle] Negro take active exercise, puts into active play the lungs, through [which] vitalized blood is sent to the brain to give liberty to the mind.” [Emphasis added]

In 1879, German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig University provided the ultimate scientific “proof” for eugenics and racism, by arrogantly declaring that as man’s soul could not be measured with scientific instruments, it did not exist. By this pronouncement, man suddenly became merely another animal. In other words, stripped of his soul by Wundt, man could be manipulated as easily as a dog could be trained to salivate at the sound of a bell.

In 1895, Alfred Ploetz, a Swiss-German psychiatrist, published his race inferiority theories in the book The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak . Calling his philosophy Rassenhygiene [racial hygiene], Ploetz openly discouraged medical care for “the weak.” In later years, Hitler and his Nazi regime would use this to decide exactly who the “weak” were and what to do about them. Ploetz and his colleagues would be credited with providing the foundations of the Nazi racial state. (See Chapter 2.)

But Ploetz helped create much more than the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. His work laid the foundation for eugenics and racial suppression in countries around the world, including Australia, Canada, England, South Africa and the United States. The following is a small sample of the disastrous effects of his work—psychological and psychiatric statements from the late 1800s to early 1900s:

“From the eugenic standpoint, such intermarriages [between White and Black] are not to be commended. … The colored race has not the energy nor the persistence of the white.”

“The Negro child is intellectually precocious [developing too early] up to puberty when a radical change takes place: his development stops suddenly or even slightly retrogresses … education does not reach the deepest layer of his soul.”

In 1918, American eugenics advocate Paul Popenoe claimed that the IQ of Blacks was determined by the amount of “white blood” in them: the lighter skinned the Black the higher their IQ, and the blacker he was, the lower the IQ.

J.T. Dunston, a British psychiatrist and South Africa’s Commissioner of Mental Hygiene, in 1923, claimed, “There are, however … grounds which suggest that the native, even of the best tribes, possibly belongs to a race which is mentally inferior to ours.” His proof? Natives are “oriented in time in the vaguest way, and generally have little idea of how old they are, or of the passage of time. Even their dancing, of which they are very fond, presents no delicate motions—an important psychological point which should be carefully studied.”

In Australia, “genocide” was practiced a little differently. Mixed race children (usually of an aboriginal mother and a white father) were taken from their mothers, placed on government reserves in the care of Whites, and denied education about their ancestry and culture.

The 1921 Report of the Aborigines State Board stated, “The continuation of this policy must eventually solve the Aboriginal problem.” It was racial genocide, an attempt to “breed out” the Aboriginal race.

The segregation and abuse of the Aborigine people was “justified” because they were “as yet incapable of self-control, innocent of the knowledge of good and evil,” ther efore requiring “protection.” Just as runaway slaves were “cured” in America, Aborigines were treated like “naughty children,” by whipping them.

In a later Australian inquiry into the effects of this program, one victim testified: “We were told that our mother was an alcoholic and that she was a prostitute and she didn’t care about us. They used to warn us that when we got older we’d have to watch it because we’d turn into sluts and alcoholics, so we had to be very careful. If you were white you didn’t have that dirtiness in you … It was in our breed, in us to be like that.”

Native peoples in America and Canada, the New Zealand Maori, and other non-white populations were treated as similarly inferior as the Jews and Gypsies in Germany. As author Francis Pal Prucha wrote in The Great Father, “Indian children were taken from homes judged unsuitable or harmful to them by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or state social workers and placed in foster or adoptive homes, usually non-Indian ... eventually [it] was perceived more accurately as a force destructive of Indian families and Indian children.”

In 2002, Native American Indian Sandy White Hawk spoke of her ordeal after being taken from her birth parents 30 years previously: “I was told that what I came from was horrible, savage, pagan, and that I was so lucky to be taken away from all of that. When I became a teenager and went through normal teenage difficulties, my mother told me, ‘Don’t grow up to be a good-for-nothing Indian.’”

Intelligence tests were another means to promote and preserve racist theories.

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

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood of America and a eugenicist, contributed an equally repulsive plan. Her “cure” for racial inferiority was sterilization. Sanger planned to “exterminate the Negro population” by inducing several black ministers with “engaging personalities,” to preach that sterilization was a solution to poverty. She stated that reaching Blacks “through a religious appeal,” would be the “most successful educational approach.”

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

In an argument similar to those made by early advocates of “racial purity,” Herrnstein, a psychologist, claimed that Americans were becoming more stupid with each generation, and advocated selective breeding to prevent human “residue” from coming into existence.

Through their history of invented racial “diseases,” arbitrary judgments on “better stock” and bogus scientific claims like “lower IQ” and “racial inferiority,” psychiatry and psychology have not only legitimized 19th, 20th and 21st century racism, but also provided the reason for outright genocide.

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