The more I delve into the history of the United States of America the more shocked I become at the depravity of southerners in how they treated African Americans over the journey. Many Americans get understandably righteous about the evil doings in Nazi Germany but what the south got up to via slavery, the black codes and Jim Crow was far more degrading over a much longer period. I have been tuning into Antonia Hylton’s Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum – listening to her speak about this important new book. I was thinking about the level of human depravity produced by slavery and the generational consequences of that dehumanizing institution. Children being born into slavery and how that indoctrinated disempowerment and low self-esteem for lifetimes and generations. Slavery is the most evil thing ever to be unleashed upon another human being.
The Evil Of White Southerners & Their Treatment Of African Americans
This book charts the creation and life span of the Crownsville Hospital, which was formerly known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland. It opened in 1911 and the authorities forced the inmates to build it brick by brick. It operated as a working tobacco and cattle farm, again with the mental patients working it for free.
“Hylton notes that from its opening until the late 1950s, the hospital operated as a segregated farm colony, with new Black patients being committed each week and the farm expanding, year after year. Patients at Crownsville ran everything from the laundry to the morgue, and were forced to cook meals and serve the white staff.”
The White Taint Of American Medicine Persists
Medicine in America still bears the taint of racism and the white medical establishment led the charge in pseudo-scientifically dehumanizing African Americans. The Nazis in Germany, of course, looked to the US in the 1930s for examples of how eugenics was being practiced as public health policy in many states. Still today, African Americans represent only 6% of the total number of MDs in the US. The white establishment has run a closed shop wherever possible, closing down African American medical schools and limiting placements at their own schools and colleges. The huge number of African American deaths from Covid during the pandemic was clear evidence of the lack of available and affordable medical care for non-whites.
White Supremacy, Trump & Going To Prison
It would be a national shame if this segregated and racist country gave a hoot about the plight of those who live on the periphery of their cities and towns. White supremacy is going through a bit of a renaissance with Donald Trump 2.0 on the hustings at the moment. The former President still has not been prosecuted, tried, and convicted for inciting an insurrection at the Capital and election interference. What do you have to do to get convicted in America if you are wealthy and white!!! In contrast to this the US has the largest prison population in the world. It is very apparent that it is much easier to get incarcerated if you are black, brown, yellow, red or poor and white.
“In total, roughly 1.9 million people are incarcerated in the United States, 803,000 people are on parole, and a staggering 2.9 million people are on probation.”
The Jim Crow South & Insanity If You Were Black
Antonia Hylton raises the horrendous spectre of what it was like to get locked up in an asylum in the Jim Crow south. All the doctors and nurses were white for the first 40 years of operation at Crownsville. The Black patients were more working slaves than anything else. They were all bunched in together whether they were violent criminals or just depressed.
“If you go back to the early 20th century to 1911, when Crownsville is first being created, you start to see the way in which the legacy of slavery and the ideas that white doctors and politicians and thinkers of the time, the way that their beliefs about Black people’s bodies and minds completely shape the creation of this system, and it informs their decision to purposefully segregate Black and white patients, to create these separate facilities and then to treat them differently within those facilities. And so this was going on even before emancipation. Doctors would write very openly about their theories. Initially, the belief was that Black people were immune to mental illness because they so enjoyed being enslaved. They were protected by their masters, and they got lots of good time in the outdoors, while working on plantations.”
- (Tonya Mosley interviewing Antonia Hylton)
Yes, medical theories from white doctors at the time promoted the idea that African Americans enjoyed slavery – how very convenient. Today, we think of most doctors as the good guys or good people, but trawl through history and you can find plenty of horrendous attitudes and lots of stupidity. Self-serving white doctors looking after their white communities and treating Blacks as nothing more than animals is a common occurrence within the medical profession of the time.
Of course, asylums in the 19C and early 20C were unfortunate places whatever the colour of your skin. Mental illness remains today a largely chemically restrained condition, especially for those incarcerated within institutions. You can imagine what ex-slaver states thought about the idea of Blacks being too crazy to function normally within the confines of their Jim Crow societies. Insane or not they were put to work, like the animals they considered them to be. Controlled by white orderlies, doctors, and nurses.
“This was about getting access to free Black labor,” she says. “In the hospital records … what you often see was a lot more commentary about the labor and the amount of products that patients could produce than you would see about mental health care outcomes, which, I think, tells you a lot about a facility’s priority.”
- (Antonia Hylton)
“The United States has a long and troubled history of manipulating psychology to control Black Americans, quell resistance, rationalize unpaid labor and justify cruelty.
At the depths of chattel slavery, white physicians argued that Black people were immune to mental illness, kept emotionally healthy by the kindness of their enslavers and the fresh air and exercise provided by working in the fields. As growing numbers of enslaved people attempted to escape, this itself was classified as a mental illness, “drapetomania.” Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a Southern “expert” in Negro medicine, prescribed one of the cures as “whipping the devil out of them.” ”
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/145624993
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt & Financial Freedom
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