Southern medicine invented pseudodiseases to pathologize Black resistance.

Evidence

Cartwright wrote about healthy Black captives laboring productively and loving enslavement. Whenever they resisted on the plantation, Cartwright wrote in 1851, they were suffering from what he called dysesthesia. “Nearly all” free Blacks were suffering from this disease, because they did not have “some white person” to “take care of them.” When enslaved Blacks ran away, they were suffering from insanity, from what he called drapetomania. “They have only to be … treated like children,” Cartwright told slaveholders, “to prevent and cure them” of this insane desire to run away. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 492

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Kendi’s causal inversion: pro-slavery policy (the plantation order) came first, and the ‘diseases’ drapetomania and dysesthesia are racist ideas invented afterward to justify it.
• ADDENDUM: Ties into the sacrifice article’s theme of ideology manufacturing justification for cruelty after the fact, though it’s a stretch; more naturally a key exhibit for the reader’s chapter goal on the inversion.