At the 1934 public mock trial of Adolf Hitler, organized by the American Jewish Congress and held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, professor of medicine Lewellys F. Barker defined Hitlerism as “a ‘psychic epidemic’ … an abnormal emotional mass movement that reminds us of the Dark Ages.” Barker argued, to a crowd of 20,000: “To understand Hitler and Hitlerism, one is compelled to enter the domain of psychopathology.” At the bitter end of an election season full of armchair diagnoses—what’s wrong with Donald Trump? What’s wrong with his supporters?—the scene feels frighteningly familiar. But is a psychological diagnosis ever a useful way to view racism? Or does it merely absolve the racist of blame for his actions?
In a forthcoming book, Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity, historian Sander Gilman and sociologist James M. Thomas look at the centuries long project to pinpoint the psychological origins of racism. Over the years, psychologists, doctors, and sociologists have wrangled over the source of racial prejudice, with some arguing that this “madness” is inspired by the toxic influence of a crowd and others looking to an individual’s particular neurology for answers.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, people thinking about the relationship between psychology and race weren’t thinking about the source of racial prejudice. Instead, they emphasized nonwhite people’s supposed biological predisposition to mental illness. “With very few exceptions, everyone across the board in the West—England, the United States, Canada, France—working in the sciences, and in popular culture, believed that. It was a truism,” Gilman told me. One example: Using numbers from the 1840 census, which discovered a high rate of insanity among free black people in the North, pro-slavery mid-19th-century reformers and physicians argued that Southern black people needed slavery to thrive. (That these 1840 numbers were contested, notably by Edward Jarvis, a physician who wrote a critique of the census findings in 1844, meant little to people who were looking for medical evidence for black inferiority.)