Are Racists Crazy?: How Prejudice Racism and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity (Biopolitics 11)

The connection and science behind race racism and mental illness In 2012 an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that – based on their clinical experiment – the beta-blocker drug Propranolol could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Shortly after the experiment an article in Time Magazine cited the study posing the question: Is racism becoming a mental illness? In Are Racists Crazy? Sander Gilman and James Thomas trace the idea of race and racism as psychopathological categories. from mid-19th century Europe to contemporary America up to the aforementioned clinical experiment at the University of Oxford and ask a slightly different question than that posed by Time: How did racism become a mental illness? Using historical archival and content analysis the authors provide a rich account of how the 19th century Sciences of Man – including anthropology medicine and biology – used race as a means of defining psychopathology and how assertions about race and madness became embedded within disciplines that deal with mental health and illness. An illuminating and riveting history of the discourse on racism antisemitism and psychopathology Are Racists Crazy? connects past and present claims about race and racism showing the dangerous implications of this specious line of thought for today.