Racist experts invented diagnoses to dismiss Black rebellion as pathology

Evidence

The growth of the Black Panther Party and other Black Power organizations in 1967 reflected the fact that Black youngsters had realized that civil rights persuasion and lobbying tactics had failed to loosen the suffocating stranglehold of police brutalizers, tyrannical slumlords, neglectful school boards, and exploitive businessmen. But nothing reflected that realization, and that effort to release the stranglehold, more than the nearly 130 violent Black rebellions from coast to coast between March and September that year. And yet racist psychiatrists announced that these “rioters” suffered from schizophrenia, which they defined as a “Black disease” that manifested in rage. To Moynihan-Report-reading sociologists, the male rioters were raging from their emasculation. Meanwhile, racist criminologists suggested that the rioters were exuding urban Blacks’ “subculture of violence,” a phrase Marvin Wolfgang used in 1967 for his classic criminology textbook. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1001

Categorization

• XREF: This is a textbook instance of Kendi’s causal inversion: the policy failure and rebellion came first, then racist ideas (Black disease, emasculation, subculture of violence) were produced to explain it away.
• SEED: Angle: how the medicalized language of ‘riot psychopathology’ prefigures modern diagnoses used to dismiss protest movements.