Mixed Race Studies

Medicalizing Racism

Contexts
Fall 2014, Volume 13, Number 4
pages 24-29
DOI: 10.1177/1536504214558213

James M. Thomas, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Mississippi

Cassandra Conlin

Sociologist James M. Thomas (JT) examines how public and scientific accounts of racism draw upon medical and psychological models, and how this contributes to our understandings of racism as a medical, rather than social, problem.

In June of 2013, Riley Cooper, a wide receiver for the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, was caught on video at a Kenny Chesney concert shouting, “I will jump that fence and fight every nigger in here, bro!” After a massive public uproar about the scene, Cooper, who is white, released a statement announcing that he would speak with “a variety of professionals” in order to ”help me better understand how I could have done something that was so offensive, and how I can start the healing process for everyone.” His team excused Cooper from activities so that he could get expert help to “understand how his words hurt so many.”

It was hardly the first time a high-profile figure sought professional counseling after being associated with an act of public racism. In 2006, while performing at a West Hollywood comedy club, Michael Richards, best known as Kramer from the hit television series Seinfeld, lashed out at hecklers, referring to them as “niggers.” Afterward, Richards’ publicist quickly issued a statement announcing that his client would seek psychiatric help. Paula Deen, Mel Gibson, and John Rocker also pledged publicly to seek treatment for their racism—reflecting a growing tendency to frame racist acts as a mental health issue.

Cassandra Conlin

How did racism come to be seen as psychopathological, and how might that understanding influence efforts to combat racism? With that question in mind, I examined mainstream print media, and conference proceedings, presidential addresses, and debates within the American Psychiatric Association from the period immediately following World War II through the present. I also analyzed public speeches by civil rights activists from the late 1950s through the early 1970s

Over time, this research shows, experts expressed growing concern about the psychopathological consequences of racism on victims, and the effects of being racist—a mental health discourse that is transforming our understanding of the nature and causes of racism. In this medicalized model, new protocols focus on treating those who suffer from the condition of racism. It is an understanding that reflects the “new racism” of the post-civil rights era…

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Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective

University Press of America
April 2010
516 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-7618-5064-3 / 978-0-7618-5064-9
Electronic ISBN: 0-7618-5092-9 / 978-0-7618-5092-2

Edited by

Julius O. Adekunle, Professor of History
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Hettie V. Williams, Lecturer, African American History
Department of History and Anthropology
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Color Struck: Essays of Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective is a compilation of expositions on race and ethnicity, written from multiple disciplinary approaches including history, sociology, women’s studies, and anthropology. This book is organized around a topical, chronological framework and is divided into three sections, beginning with the earliest times to the contemporary world. The term “race” has nearly become synonymous with the word “ethnicity,” given the most recent findings in the study of human genetics that have led to the mapping of human DNA. Color Struck attempts to answer questions and provide scholarly insight into issues related to race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part 1: The First Complex Societies to Modern Times

1. Race, Science, and Human Origins in Africa
Julius O. Adekunle

2. Race and the Rise of the Swahili Culture
Julius O. Adekunle

3. ‘Caste’-[ing] Gender: Caste and Patriarchy in Ancient Hindu Jurisprudence
Indira Jalli

4. Comparative Race and Slavery in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: Texts, Practices, and Current Implications
Magid Shihade

5. The Dark Craven Jew: Race and Religion in Medieval Europe
James M. Thomas

6. Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Racial Slavery in the New World
Kwaku Osei Tutu

7. The Yellow Lady: Mulatto Women in the Suriname Plantocracy
Hilde Neus

Part 2: Race and Mixed Race in the Americas

8. Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Approaches to Resistance and Social Justice
Andrew Jolivétte

9. Militant Multiraciality: Rejecting Race and Rejecting the Conveniences of Complicity
Rainier Spencer

10. Whiteness Reconstructed: Multiracial Identity as a Category of “New White”
Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma

11. Conversations in Black and White: The Limitations of Binary Thinking About Race in America
Johanna E. Foster

12. The Necessity of a Multiracial Category in a Race-Conscious Society
Francis Wardle

13. Mixed Race Terminologies in the Americas: Globalizing the Creole in the Twenty First Century
DeMond S. Miller, Jason D. Rivera, and Joel C. Telin

14. Examining the Regional and Multigenerational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
Andrew Jolivétte

15. Race, Class, and Power: The Politics of Multiraciality in Brazil
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

16. All Mixed Up: A New Racial Commonsense in Global Perspective
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

Part 3: Race, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Contemporary Societies

17. Black No More: African Americans and the ‘New’ Race Science
Hettie V. Williams

18. Contesting Identities of Color: African Female Immigrants in the Americas
Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika

19. Burdened Intersections: Black Women and Race, Gender, and Class
Marsha J. Tyson Darling

20. Ethnic Conflicts in the Middle East: A Comparative Analysis of Communal Violence within the Matrix of the Colonial Legacy, Globalization, and Global Stability
Magid Shihade

21. Ethnic Identity in China: The Politics of Cultural Difference
Dru C. Gladney

22. Shangri-la has Forsaken Us: China’s Ethnic Minorities, Identity, and Government Repression
Reza Hasmath

23. The Russian/Chechen Conflict and It’s Consequences
Mariana Tepfenhart

Contributors
Index