Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity

At a moment when race has resurfaced as an urgent part of the American discourse, Gilman (Seeing the Insane) and Thomas (Affective Labor) critically examine shifting views on race in the social sciences during the 20th century. The authors’ central project is mapping the change from pathologizing race (characterizing Jewish and black people as more susceptible to mental illnesses) to pathologizing racism. They describe how some Jewish psychiatrists at the start of the 20th century accepted the argument that those of their faith were more prone to hysteria, and how asylums in the post-emancipation South tried to treat black patients by recreating the conditions of slavery. The writers locate the central switch in attitudes in the aftermath of WWII, when the world was looking to the nascent fields of social and behavioral science to explain how the people of Germany came to commit such atrocities. This coincided with the birth of the civil rights movement, and led to examinations of the mental toll racism exacts on its victims and eventually, controversially, the costs to its perpetrators. Gilman and Thomas make their case methodically, with rigorous, far-reaching scholarship. They provide no easy answers but plenty of food for thought amid America’s current crisis in race relations. (Dec.)