Outside the “Norm,” and Madness

Benny Russell (Avery Brooks) writes for Incredible Tales, a science-fiction magazine, in 1950s New York in the DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars.”

(Other members of the writing staff look on.)

In the “Far Beyond the Stars” episode (season 6, episode 13) of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) is given a vision, by an alien race, of himself as Benny Russell—a science-fiction writer in 1950’s America.

During the episode, he is beaten by two policemen, endures aggression from shopkeepers, and is criticized by his Editor for writing “unbelievable” stories in which a Negro man is a starship captain.
Benny begins to question his own sanity.

While I was writing the 10/1/23 memorandum “Fit to be Tied (in a Straitjacket),” I didn’t cover the effect of being Black, on whether people may be confined for behaving in a way that seems “mad’ or “out of the norm.”

In 1851, an American health “expert,” Samuel A. Cartwright (1793-1863), invented a new “disease of the mind.”
He called it “drapetomania”—the wish of slaves to escape from their masters.
According to Dr. Cartwright, any slave who wanted to escape from his/her state of slavery, was by definition “crazy.”
(Similar beliefs about women, caused men to place their wives in insane asylums.
If a housewife wasn’t content with her lot in life, she could be locked up, or a few generations later, lobotomized!)

After the Civil War, Southern states set up mental hospital facilities specifically for Black patients.
Between 1861-1882, asylums (with separate wings for Black patients) opened in at least seven states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
“Treatments” included experimental surgeries and forced sterilization.

In the Heat of the Night (the 1967 film) starred Sidney Poitier as Detective Virgil Tibbs.

Reacting to being slapped, Detective Tibbs slaps a wealthy plantation owner.

(It was Poitier’s idea for Detective Tibbs to return the slap.)

A generation later, Confederate veteran John Fulenwider Miller (1834-1905) arrived on the scene.
He was superintendent of a North Carolina state mental institution for Black patients from 1888 to 1906.
Dr. Miller claimed that the Black nervous system was “less sensitive to environments.”
At the same time, he theorized that Blacks were “unable to handle freedom,” because they were “mentally weaker” than white people.
His medical journal articles influenced generations of medical professionals, and caused great harm to patients.

Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) is chained to John "Joker" Jackson (Tony Curtis) in a lobby card for Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones.

Kramer’s goal was to stress that all human beings have the same nature.

About 50 years later, Clennon Washington King Jr. (1920-2000) was a university professor, minister, and politician.
In 1958, he tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi for summer classes, but was denied.
Local authorities couldn’t arrest him for this attempt, so instead Reverend King was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, for twelve days. 

Between the 1920s through the 1980s, as many as 100,000 to 150,000 people a year (often Black, Latin, Native American, and recent immigrants) were sterilized in the U.S. and its’ territories.
Frequently, this was done without their consent.
Patients were vulnerable to this procedure because they were being confined—in mental institutions, or in prisons.

Hospital patient McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) talks with hospital orderly Turkle (Scatman Crothers) in a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Dr. Arthur L. Whaley (Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas) has stated that today Black patients are more likely to be hospitalized in mental hospitals than white patients who have the same symptoms.
Also, Blacks are incarcerated longer in mental hospitals, and are more likely to be restrained with drugs.

Not only are Blacks more likely to be forcibly committed to mental institutions; they are burdened by various false perceptions.
According to a 2017 article (published by the American Psychological Association*) Black men are perceived as larger, and more threatening, than white men of the exact same size and weight.
This has resulted in Black men—especially those undergoing a mental health crisis—being murdered in interactions with police, even when they are unarmed.
According to the same study, Black men with darker skin tones, are feared more than Black men with lighter skin tones!

The “Racial Bias” study involved men.
However, I’m sure that if a similar study were performed involving Black women, there would be a similar result.
The Kentucky police department must have perceived Breonna Tayler as a dangerous “superwoman.”
Why else were three heavily-armed policemen sent to search the apartment of an emergency room technician?
Why did Sandra Bland end up dead in a Texas jail cell?
Was it for not showing “sufficient respect” (as a Black woman) to a white male state trooper, after a lane change traffic stop?
The African American Policy Forum (#SAYHERNAME) has a lot of data on this subject. 

*”Racial Bias in Judgments of Physical Size and Formidability: From Size to Threat,” by John Wilson, PhD, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, March 13, 2017.