Psychiatry’s degeneracy theory gave rise to an internal social racism

Evidence

Foucault said: “You see how psychiatry can use this notion of degeneracy, these analyses of heredity to establish a connection with, or rather to give rise to a racism.” He added that Nazism had simply linked, in its turn, this new racism to the ethnic racism that was endemic in the nineteenth century, when it was used to provide an internal social defense against the abnormals. … Against this backdrop of war, of the wars, struggles, and rebellions of those years when, as the saying went, “there was red in the air,” “Society Must Be Defended” might be described as the meeting point, the hinge or the point of articulation of the political problem of power and the historical question of race: the genealogy of racism, beginning with the historical discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the race struggle, and the transformations they underwent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 301

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s Islamophobia field: psychiatric/biological racism as a precursor mechanism that later readings will build on. — connects to: Society’s racist structure creates and perpetuates the colonized patient’s inferiority complex. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 360; Anti-Psychiatry’s decline tracks capitalist realism’s rise — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2217
• DEFINE: Establishes the mechanism by which a medical-hereditary discourse converts into racism, a load-bearing concept for the field.

Broader Connections

• Society’s racist structure creates and perpetuates the colonized patient’s inferiority complex. #expands (0.78) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 360