Benjamin Rush’s leprosy theory pathologized Blackness as a curable disease

Evidence

This skin disease was brought on by poor diet, he theorized, along with “greater heat, more savage manners, and bilious fevers.” He then listed other side effects of the skin disease: Blacks’ physical superiority, their “wooly heads,” their laziness, their hypersexuality, and their insensitivity to pain. “They bear surgical operations much better than white people,” Rush quoted a doctor as saying. “I have amputated the legs of many negroes, who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 338

Categorization

• XREF: A perfect case to test against Kendi’s inversion claim: even a self-described racial egalitarian and abolitionist produced racist ‘scientific’ ideas — showing ideas can spring from within an antiracist stance, complicating the strict policy-first model.