My life in books

Danielle L. McGuire’s book At The Dark End of the Street, subtitled Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, looks at the role of black women’s resistance to sexual violence at the hands of white men in the history of the civil rights movement. As she notes in her Introduction:

“And yet analyses of rape and sexualized violence play little or no role in most histories of the civil rights movement, which present it as a struggle between black and white men—the heroic leadership of Martin Luther King confronting intransigent white supremacists like “Bull” Connor. The real story—that the civil rights movement is also rooted in African-American women’s long struggle against sexual violence—has never before been written. The stories of black women who fought for bodily integrity and personal dignity hold profound truths about the sexualized violence that marked racial politics and African American lives during the modern civil rights movement. If we understand the role rape and sexual violence played in African Americans’ daily lives and within the larger freedom struggle, we have to reinterpret, if not rewrite, the history of the civil rights movement.”

In her landmark book, McGuire focuses on the history of black women and sexual violence in Montgomery, Alabama - the home of icon and activist Rosa Parks and in some ways the birthplace of the civil rights movement in the South - where in 1944, Recy Taylor’s speaking out about her rape made headlines and brought Parks, then a NAACP worker, to nearby Abbeville to investigate the case. Using Montgomery as a case study for her thesis, McGuire follows the stories of sexual violence and the response of the black community, particularly black women - but she makes it clear that Montgomery is hardly an anomaly, that such race-based sexual violence was and is endemic in America.

“Montgomery, Alabama, was not the only place in which attacks on black women fueled protests against white supremacy. Between 1940 and 1975, sexual violence and interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy. Civil rights campaigns in Little Rock, Arkansas; Macon, Georgia; Tallahassee, Florida; Washington, North Carolina; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and many other places had roots in organized resistance to sexual violence and appeals for protection of black womanhood.”

While her focus in examining black activism in response to sexual violence is on the harassment and rape of black women, uncounted numbers of whom were victims of white men who were never punished, McGuire does not ignore the way that accusations of gendered violence were used against black men, thousands of whom were falsely accused of offenses against white women and, if they escaped lynching, found it nearly impossible to convince the courts of their innocence.

However, her central narrative is clear in connecting the growing outrage at the numerous incidents of black women abducted and raped by white men with the impetus to activism. Years before the assault on Recy Taylor, the cause of the Scottsboro nine - nine black youths convicted of raping two white women - brought together black civil rights activists and white progressives to fight for justice; Taylor’s case galvanised protest and resulted in the formation of organisations whose activities would expand and persist.

Despite their best efforts, it proved impossible to win convictions against Taylor’s rapists, who either denied their involvement, or alleged that she was a known prostitute whom they had paid. But the movement went on to take up the cases of other black women, and to broadcast information about these assaults across the country.

Aside from entrenched racism and the belief that the rape of black women was not really a crime, the progressives and activists involved in fighting for equal justice faced serious opposition from another direction: the cold war fear of Communist ‘infiltrtion’ and McCarthyism. Many of those, white and black, who took up the cause of equal justice for blacks were, or had t one time been, involved in groups that the government had identified as communist. In some cases, so many members of civil rights organisations were also linked to socialist or communist groups, that the FBI considered them as Communist fronts. This led to their civil rights positions and actions being discounted as Russian propaganda intended to destabilise and discredit the U.S.

Yet on the other hand, the post-war era had seen many black veterans returning from the theatres in Europe and the Pacific, changed by their participation in the war against fascism. These former soldiers “...returned home with a new sense of pride and purpose and often led campaigns for citizenship rights, legal equality, and bodily integrity. In small towns and cities across the South, black veterans became the “shock troops” of an emerging civil rights movement.”

In the mythology of the civil rights movement, the spark is Rosa Park’s refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery bus. Parks is often portrayed as a woman who simply was too tired, and snapped one day. In reality, the organising had begun years before, around the far more complex issue of violence against blacks, and particularly sexual violence against black women. McGuire draws the connections between this focus and the bus protests. Most working black women could not afford cars; to get to their places of work - many were domestic workers who lived far from the homes of their employers - they had to ride the buses. But the indignities did not end at having to sit at the back of the bus. Black people were often subjected to verbal and physical assault for the slightest indication of disrespect. They could be required to pay at the front, then get off and board at the rear doors - unless the bus driver decided to drive off without them. Bus drivers sometimes beat black riders who sat in the wrong seats, or refused to get up and move further back, or get off if a seat was needed for a white person. The buses were a site of white violence toward blacks.

McGuire’s narrative of the Montgomery bus boycott, and other actions undertaken during the civil rights era to bring public pressure to bear on the rampant discrimination and racism of the Southern US, restore to its place the forgotten role of black women. Parks was not the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat or defend herself in court; she was just the first woman with a sufficiently impeccable reputation to risk a national news event on. Much of the organising and fundraising during the boycott was done by women. Women organised car pools and drove cars. And in the thousands, women walked, or shared rides, rather than break the boycott, in the face of daiky threats and abuse. Women were charged and arrested for their roles in the boycott, but the media narrative focused on the male ministers, and above all, on the charismatic young Martin Luther King Jr. in making him the hero of the movement, the work of black women was pushed into shadows.

Women were active, organising, marching, working on voter registration, desegregating lunch counters and schools, their work and courage the backbone of the civil rights movement. Women like Jo Ann Robinson and Fannie Lou Hamer gave tirelessly of their energy and time in the movement. Like the men, they risked harassment, loss of employment, beatings, jail, destructions of property snd homes through vandalism and arson, and death. They also risked sexual intimidation, humiliation and rape.

McGuire spares the reader none of the details of the brutal acts that shored up white supremacy, the beatings, rapes, torturings, deliberate mutilations, and murders of black men, women and children for the slightest of imagined offences against the “proper order” of society, for being “uppity” or indeed for no reason at all other than the fear, insecurity and rage of white people. McGuire writes about the civil rights era, the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, but the reader cannot forget, as the horrifying images emerge from the page, that the violence continues.

Michelle Alexander's book on the carceral state, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is rightfully on most lists of essential books to read for an understanding of race in America. It is a masterful indictment of the ways in which the American justice and penal systems continue the job of the former "Jim Crow" laws, of keeping black Americans in the role of second-class citizens, with limited rights and reduced access to everything from jobs to participation in the political system. As Alexander notes in her Introduction,

"The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history. And while the size of the system alone might suggest that it would touch the lives of most Americans, the primary targets of its control can be defined largely by race."

She goes on to say that " ...despite the unprecedented levels of incarceration in the African American community, the civil rights community is oddly quiet. One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system—in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole—yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis)."

In The New Jim Crow, Alexander demonstrates with overwhelming evidence that mass incarceration is indeed a racial justice issue, and one that should he at the forefront of the social justice agenda.

"This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system. Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nation’s “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today—i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters—has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system."

Alexander begins her argument with a discussion of past 'racial caste systems' - slavery and the Jim Crow - and how the same results are created again and again by changing social structures and institutions: "... there is a certain pattern to the births and deaths of racial caste in America. Time and again, the most ardent proponents of racial hierarchy have succeeded in creating new caste systems by triggering a collapse of resistance across the political spectrum. This feat has been achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American totem pole. This pattern, dating back to slavery, has birthed yet another racial caste system in the United States: mass incarceration."

The essence of Alexander's argument is demonstrated through detailed historical research. She shows clearly how, almost from the moment of emancipation following the civil war, unjust laws and prisons that are little more than enforced eork camps have been used to perform the same social functions that slavery did, to deny human rights, civil rights, and the rights of citizenship to black Americans, and to coerce their labour to support the economy to the benefit of white Americans. Of the Reconstruction Era, she writes that "... tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested during this period, many of them hit with court costs and fines, which had to be worked off in order to secure their release. With no means to pay off their “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, farms, plantations, and dozens of corporations throughout the South. Death rates were shockingly high, for the private contractors had no interest in the health and well-being of their laborers, unlike the earlier slave-owners who needed their slaves, at a minimum, to be healthy enough to survive hard labor."

The Jim Crow era - the name is most likely derived from a popular minstrel show character - stretched from the Reconstruction to the post-WWII period, when changes began to appear, sparked by the nascent civil rights movement, the growing presences in politics of blacks in the North, and a desire to actualise the American ideals of freedom and equality which were made much of during the war. Of the Jim Crow era itself, Alexander notes that "By the turn of the twentieth century, every state in the South had laws on the books that disenfranchised blacks and discriminated against them in virtually every sphere of life, lending sanction to a racial ostracism that extended to schools, churches, housing, jobs, restrooms, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries. Politicians competed with each other by proposing and passing ever more stringent, oppressive, and downright ridiculous legislation (such as laws specifically prohibiting blacks and whites from playing chess together). The public symbols and constant reminders of black subjugation were supported by whites across the political spectrum, though the plight of poor whites remained largely unchanged."

But even as Jim Crow laws were challenged and civil rights were - at least formally - gained for American blacks, the development of a 'law and order' focus that would ultimately lead to today's carceral state had begun. In federal and state legislatures, the strongest supporters of law and order platforms were the same politicians who opposed civil rights legislation. Initially, race-based arguments were openly used by the 'law and order' proponents - they pointed to lower crime rates in the south where segregation remained the unwritten law of the land and referred to civil rights protestors as criminals.

Later, the racism in the law and order platform because implicit, with the concept of a 'culture of poverty' which led to crime standing in for a direct association between being black and being more prone to criminality. This 'colourblind' language became the norm among conservative politicians by the time that Reagan sought office:

"In his campaign for the presidency, Reagan mastered the “excision of the language of race from conservative public discourse” and thus built on the success of earlier conservatives who developed a strategy of exploiting racial hostility or resentment for political gain without making explicit reference to race. Condemning “welfare queens” and criminal “predators,” he rode into office with the strong support of disaffected whites—poor and working-class whites who felt betrayed by the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights agenda. As one political insider explained, Reagan’s appeal derived primarily from the ideological fervor of the right wing of the Republican Party and “the emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him ‘in his place’ or at least echo their own anger and frustration.” To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His “colorblind” rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states’ rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability. For example, when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi—the town where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964—he assured the crowd “I believe in states’ rights,” and promised to restore to states and local governments the power that properly belonged to them. His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar—arguing that something is racist but finding it impossible to prove in the absence of explicitly racist language."

With the introduction of the "war on drugs" the pieces were finally in place for a massive increase in law and order funding to provide more police and more prisons. Signalling its true goals with clarity, the federal budget for law enforcement grew in the wake of the war on drugs while spending on drug prevention, education and treatment programs was cut. At the same time, urban black men - most of whom had traditionally worked in blue collar jobs requiring minimal education - were facing an employment crisis due largely to globalisation and the shift from an industrial to a service based economy. Poverty, unemployment, the introduction of crack cocaine into urban centres, increased policing, welfare crackdowns and a 'tough on crime' policy among bith conservatives and liberals set the stage for mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of black Americans.

"The law and order perspective, first introduced during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement by rabid segregationists, had become nearly hegemonic two decades later. By the mid-1990s, no serious alternatives to the War on Drugs and “get tough” movement were being entertained in mainstream political discourse. Once again, in response to a major disruption in the prevailing racial order—this time the civil rights gains of the 1960s—a new system of racialized social control was created by exploiting the vulnerabilities and racial resentments of poor and working-class whites. More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote. The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born."

Alexander examines in depth the ways in which the 'war on drugs' has been used as a justification for massive investment in policing and prisons, changes in the execution of laws which make arrest and conviction easier, and incentives from grants to military equipment to asset seizures which motivate police departments to focus their resources on drug-related crime. Starting with the legal processes of warrants, search and seizure of evidence, she follows the trail through to incarceration and disenfranchisement, and the denial of access to employment, housing, education, professional certification and other essentials of living to released felons, showing the coded racism of anti-drug and anti-crime propaganda, legislation and police action, and demonstrating the ways in which the system operates to disproportionately target black communities.

In the final section of the book, Alexander addresses the massive challenge posed by any attempt to end this prison-centred system of racial caste control. The end of the carceral state requires first the end of the War on Drugs and the ideas that black communities are the primary centre of drug activity, that black men are the primary actors in the drug trade. The first principle of change, then requires an "understanding that any movement to end mass incarceration must deal with mass incarceration as a racial caste system, not as a system of crime control." In order to achieve this understanding, Americans must be willing to give up the false ideal of 'colourblindness' and look at - and have a national conversation on - the realities of race.

In considering the factors that have worked against the development of a clear consciousness of racial inequity, Alexander makes an interesting argument for the end of affirmative action:

"Racial justice advocates should consider, with a degree of candor that has not yet been evident, whether affirmative action—as it has been framed and defended during the past thirty years—has functioned more like a racial bribe than a tool of racial justice. One might wonder, what does affirmative action have to do with mass incarceration? Well, perhaps the two are linked more than we realize. We should ask ourselves whether efforts to achieve “cosmetic” racial diversity—that is, reform efforts that make institutions look good on the surface without the needed structural changes—have actually helped to facilitate the emergence of mass incarceration and interfered with the development of a more compassionate race consciousness."

She goes on to itemise the specific reasons behind this proposition: "... (a) it has helped to render a new caste system largely invisible; (b) it has helped to perpetuate the myth that anyone can make it if they try; (c) it has encouraged the embrace of a “trickle down theory of racial justice”; (d) it has greatly facilitated the divide-and-conquer tactics that gave rise to mass incarceration; and (e) it has inspired such polarization and media attention that the general public now (wrongly) assumes that affirmative action is the main battlefront in U.S. race relations." Alexander makes a strong argument that, by facilitating a small number of success stories that showcase 'black exceptionalism,' affirmative action actually supports the continuation of the carceral state by seeming to say that 'if these black individuals can succeed, that means the failure if most to do so is rooted in personal choices and decisions, not systemic racism.'

Her closing thoughts on the path to an end to the carceral state and the beginning of a society based on social justice for all look back to the shift that Martin Luther King Jr. was moving toward when his life and evolution as a leader for social change was brutally ended. As he said in introducing the idea of the Poor People's Campaign, "I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…[W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society."

Jonathan Metzl's The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease is an examination of how institutionalised racism and social constructs of "abnormal behaviour" have influenced the changing psychiatric definitions of certain mental illnesses - specifically schizophrenia and the now out of fashion dementia praecox - and resulted in a situation in which "... African-American ​patients ​were ​'significantly ​more ​likely' ​than ​white ​patients ​to ​receive ​schizophrenia ​diagnoses, ​and ​'significantly ​less ​likely' ​than ​white ​patients ​to ​receive ​diagnoses ​for ​other ​mental ​illnesses ​such ​as ​depression ​or ​bipolar ​disorder."

In noting that black men entering treatment (voluntarily or otherwise) for mental illness are far more likely to receive a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia than any other racial group, Metzl argues that allthough "Everyday ​racism ​seems ​a ​reasonable ​explanation ​for ​these ​findings," the situation is actually more complex. In the preface to his book, Metzl states:

This ​book ​makes ​a ​broader ​claim: ​from ​a ​historical ​perspective, ​race ​impacts ​medical ​communication ​because ​racial ​tensions ​are ​structured ​into ​clinical ​interactions ​long ​before ​doctors ​and ​patients ​enter ​examination ​rooms. ​To ​a ​remarkable ​extent, ​anxieties ​about ​racial ​difference ​shape ​diagnostic ​criteria, ​healthcare ​policies, ​medical ​and ​popular ​attitudes ​about ​mentally ​ill ​persons, ​the ​structures ​of ​treatment ​facilities, ​and, ​ultimately, ​the ​conversations ​that ​take ​place ​there ​within.

Focusing on how the diagnosis of schizophrenia was used to classify people admitted to Ionia State Hospital in Michigan from the 1940s onwards until it closed as a mental institute in the late 1970s, Metzl examines the changing use of this diagnosis. Initially given primarily to nonviolent white criminals and distressed housewives - who were seen as ill but not dangerous - by the 1970s it was predominantly assigned to black men supposedly characterised by "masculinized belligerence."

In his book, Metzl looks at the origins and evolving definitions of schizophrenia in the context of social changes, and particularly racial politics and the civil rights movement in the USA, especially in Detroit which was part of the catchment area of Ionia Hospital. As Metzl notes:

American ​assumptions ​about ​the ​race, ​gender, ​and ​temperament ​of ​schizophrenia ​changed ​beginning ​in ​the ​1960s. ​Many ​leading ​medical ​and ​popular ​sources ​suddenly ​described ​schizophrenia ​as ​an ​illness ​manifested ​not ​by ​docility, ​but ​by ​rage. ​Growing ​numbers ​of ​research ​articles ​from ​leading ​psychiatric ​journals ​asserted ​that ​schizophrenia ​was ​a ​condition ​that ​also ​afflicted ​"Negro ​men," ​and ​that ​black ​forms ​of ​the ​illness ​were ​marked ​by ​volatility ​and ​aggression. ​In ​the ​worst ​cases, ​psychiatric ​authors ​conflated ​the ​schizophrenic ​symptoms ​of ​African-American ​patients ​with ​the ​perceived ​schizophrenia ​the ​civil ​rights ​protests, ​particularly ​those ​organized ​by ​Black ​Power, ​Black ​Panthers, ​Nation ​of ​Islam, ​or ​other ​activist ​groups.

As Metzl further comments in the preface:

As ​but ​one ​example, ​the ​title ​of ​this ​book ​comes ​from ​a ​1968 ​article that ​appeared ​in ​the ​prestigious ​Archives ​of ​General ​Psychiatry, ​in ​which ​psychiatrists ​Walter ​Bromberg ​and ​Frank ​Simon ​described ​schizophrenia ​as ​a ​"protest ​psychosis" ​whereby ​black ​men ​developed ​"hostile ​and ​aggressive ​feelings" ​and ​"delusional ​anti-whiteness" ​
after ​listening ​to ​the ​words ​of ​Malcolm ​X, ​joining ​the ​Black ​Muslims, ​or ​aligning ​with ​groups ​that ​preached ​militant ​resistance ​to ​white ​society. ​According ​to ​the ​authors, ​the ​men ​required ​psychiatric ​treatment ​because ​their ​symptoms ​threatened ​not ​only ​their ​own ​sanity, ​but ​the ​social ​order ​of ​white ​America. ​Bromberg ​and ​Simon ​
argued ​that ​black ​men ​who ​"espoused ​African ​or ​Islamic" ​ideologies, adopted ​"Islamic ​names" ​that ​were ​changed ​in ​such ​a ​way ​so ​as ​to ​deny ​"the ​previous ​Anglicization ​of ​their ​names" ​in ​fact ​demonstrated ​a ​"delusional ​anti-whiteness" ​that ​manifest ​as ​"paranoid ​projections ​of ​the ​Negroes ​to ​the ​Caucasian ​group."

Metzl further quotes Bromberg and Simon on the 'sypmtoms' of this protest psychosis: “antiwhite productions and attitudes. . . . It becomes apparent that the intellectual dissociation represents in part a refusal to accept the syntactical language of standard English. . . . Often the prisoners draw pictures or write material of an Islamic nature, elaborating their ideas in the direction of African ideology with a decided ‘primitive’ accent. . . . The language used may be borrowed from the ancient ‘Veve.’ . . . Bizarre religious ideas are Moslem in character, either directly from Mohammedan practice or improvised.”

Key to Metzel's argument is the fact that "... the ​rhetorics ​of ​health ​and ​illness ​become ​effective ​ways ​of ​policing ​the ​boundaries ​of ​civil ​society, ​and ​of ​keeping ​these ​people ​always ​outside." Marginalised groups have historically been characterised as more likely to be diseased or defective, either physically or mentally, and discontent with society or one's assigned status in it, no matter how merited, as a marker of mental health issues. Metzl lists some of the ways in which this has manifested or been observed with regard to both political dissidents and racialised groups, points particularly pertinent to an examination of the psychiatric labelling of black makes during the 1960s, a period of civil rights activism and black power movements that combined both political protest and a heightened presentation and awareness of racial discontents.

Scholars have long argued that medical and governmental institutions code threats to authority as mental illnesses during moments of political turmoil. Much of the best-known literature on the subject comes from outside the United States. International human rights activists such as Walter Reich have long chronicled the ways in which
Soviet psychiatrists in so-called Psikhushka hospitals diagnosed political dissidents with schizophrenia. Meanwhile, Michel Foucault often cited French hospitals as examples to support his belief that the discourses of the human sciences produce and discipline deviant subjects in the larger project of maintaining particular power hierarchies. Foucault also importantly developed a theory of "state racism," whereby governments use emancipatory discourses of what he called "race struggle" as excuses for the further oppression of
minority groups. Meanwhile, the Martinique-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon called on his experiences in Algeria to describe a North African syndrome in which political and medical subjugation literally
created psychiatric symptoms in colonized subjects. Fanon's important schema, discussed at length below, focused on the ways in which racist social structures reproduce themselves not only in political or economic institutions, but also in the "damaged" psyches of people it needs to control.

As Metzl notes, however, the history of ascribing specific kinds of mental illness to black patients predates the civil rights movement by a considerable length of time. He notes the early history of the diagnosis of mental illness among blacks in America, which usually worked in support of

... existing beliefs [that] "Negroes" were biologically unfit for freedom. This troubling argument emerged from the work of American surgeon Samuel Cartwright, who wrote in 1851 in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal that the tendency of slaves to run away from their captors was a treatable medical disorder. Cartwright described two types of insanity among slaves. Drapetomania resulted when "the white man attempts to oppose the Deity's will, by trying to make the Negro anything else than 'the submissive knee-bender' (which the Almighty declared he should be) by trying to raise him to a level with himself, or by putting himself on an equality with the Negro." According to Cartwright, such unnatural kindness led to a form of mania whose sole symptom was the propensity of slaves to run away. Similarly, dysaesthesia aethiopis, which is Cartwrights term for the "rascality" and "disrespect for the master's property" that resulted when African Americans did not have whites overseeing their every action. Cartwright theorized that both conditions resulted from biological lesions and he advised treating both with whipping, hard labor, and in extreme cases, amputation of the toes.

Metzl includes in his arguments a brief overview of the development of the understanding of schizophrenia as a mental illness. Originally known as dementia praecox, one school of researchers characterised the disease as "... a biological illness caused by underlying organic lesions or faulty metabolism ... [that] resulted from irreversible biological changes..." Others theorised that dementia praecox "...was not a biological disorder, but was instead a psychical splitting of the basic functions of the personality." This splitting "...was accompanied not by violence, but by symptoms such as indifference, creativity, passion, and even fanaticism." This theory led to the use if the term schizophrenia, from the Greek words for "split" (schizo) and "mind" (phrene).

Metzl notes that the differences in theorising about praecox as opposed to schizophrenia resulted in the condition being interpreted very differently based on the psychiatrist's beliefs concerning its etiology. Those who followed the idea of schizophrenia as an illness of personality instead of biology tended to describe patients in terms that "...remained largely, though by no means entirely, free of connections to violence, invasions, crime, impurity, and other eugenic staples." Patients with schizophrenia were in general not seen as dangers or as threats, but as persons needing nurturing in order to find the "sensitive and tender nature" hidden behind a patient's "cold and unresponsive exterior." Leading clinicians "... advocated teaching patients how to function as adults through activities that substituted 'objective The reality for phantasy' such as occupational therapy, physical exercise, and the encouragement of participation in 'dances, concerts, and other opportunities for social contact.' "

Those who understood schizophrenia to be essentially the same as the organically caused dementia praecox, however, were more likely to see it as a racialised disease:

... in 1913, Arrah Evarts, a psychiatrist from the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C., wrote an article in the Psychoanalytic Review titled "Dementia Praecox in the Colored Race" in which she described dramatic increases in the illness in "colored" patients.

.... Evarts linked the appearance of praecox in these and other patients to the pressures of freedom - pressures for which "Negroes," she argued, were biologically unfit. Speaking of slavery,
Evarts wrote, 'This bondage in reality was a wonderful aid to the colored man. The necessity of mental initiative was never his, and his racial characteristic of imitation carried him far on the road. But after he became a free man, the conditions under which he must continue his progress became infinitely harder. He must now think for himself, and exercise forethought if he and his family are to live at all; two things which has [sic] so far not been demanded and for which there was no racial preparation. It has been said by many observers whose words can scarce be doubted that a crazy Negro was a rare sight before emancipation. However that may be, we know he is by no means rare today.'

However, as the clinical use of the diagnosis of dementia praecox declined and the conceptualisation of schizophrenia as a disease of personality became the prevailing one, this tendency toward a racialised diagnosis declined. As Metzl points out, "Prior ​to ​the ​civil ​rights ​movement, ​mainstream ​American ​medical ​and ​popular ​opinion ​often ​assumed ​that ​patients ​with ​schizophrenia ​were ​largely ​white, ​and ​generally ​harmless ​to ​society."

As the civil rights movement and other events highlighting the unrest among black people in this the U.S. entered the consciousness of the public and the psychiatric profession alike, a shift began to appear in the perceptions of mental illness. Metzl notes that the release of the revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II) in 1968, on which many symptoms of mental illness were seen as maladaptions to the patient's environment, both reflected and in some ways codified an understanding of schizophrenia as a violent disorder commonly seen among black patients. By the 70s, anti-psychotic drugs marketed for treatment of schizophrenia were often advertised with imagery that suggested angry black men, inner city tensions, or "primitive" thought processes - the latter imagery often suggesting or openly using traditional African art or artefacts.

In examining the language used to discuss research into psychiatric conditions beginning in the 60s, Metzl observes that "... data analysis suggests that authors of research articles in leading psychiatric journals preferentially applied language connoting aggression and hostility to African Americans during the 1960s and 1970s. The spike in such associations raises the specter that the DSM-II codified ways of talking about blackness in addition to talking about mental illness. To be sure, the DSM claimed to seek neutrality. But, in the real world, doctors and researchers used the manual’s charged language to modify, describe, and ultimately diagnose the category of black under the rubric of the category of schizophrenia."

This developing construct of schizophrenia as a disease of blacks led into madness by hostility and delusions triggered by the "antiwhite" ideas of prominent black leaders was not limited to psychiatric circles. Increasingly during the 60s, the media began using the imagery of schizophrenia and psychosis to discuss racial unrest among blacks in America.

For instance, an electronic newspaper archive search for articles with the terms schizophrenia and schizophrenic in combination with terms such as Negro, racial, civil rights, and, by comparison, with Caucasian, feminism, and Equal Rights Amendment, reveals a series of significant numeric trends starting in the late 1950s. As but a few examples, the electronic archives of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune show the terms Negro plus schizophrenia or schizophrenic returned 36 results dated 1930 to 1955 and a staggering 259 results dated 1956 to 1979. A search for Negro plus paranoid or paranoia similarly returned 12 results dated 1930 to 1955 versus 358 results dated 1956 to 1979. Caucasian or white plus schizophrenic or schizophrenia returned no results from 1930 to 1955 and only 1 from 1956 to 1979, and feminism or women’s rights plus schizophrenia or schizophrenic returned no results from 1930 to 1955 and 10 results dated 1956 to 1979.

Metzl goes on to note the way in which this imagery of schizophrenia was used to differentiate between "good" blacks, who did not raise anxiety in mainstream, white, society, and "bad" blacks, who were angry and appeared poised to destroy the social order: "Schizophrenia also provided a framework for dividing civilized blacks from unruly ones, the Martin Luther Kings and Jackie Robinsons who espoused nonviolence from the LeRoi Joneses, Stokely Carmichaels, and Rap Browns who did not."

During this period, the black press, and black leaders and theorists, also adopted the psychiatric imagery of schizophrenia, but for them it was seen in reverse. Rather than categorising the revolutionary black man as violently mentally ill, and his protest, his frustration and his anger as the symptoms of his disease, black writers saw the situation of a black man living in a white supremacist society as the cause of a kind of survival schizophrenia and revolution the healthy road to a cure. "In their pages, schizophrenia also became a rhetorically black disease. But, instead of a condition caused by civil rights, schizophrenia resulted from the conditions that made civil rights necessary. Civil rights did not make people crazy, racism did. Instead of a mark of stigma, schizophrenia functioned as a protest identity and an internalized, projected form of defiance."

It is when Metzl turns his attention to his historical research into the medical files of hundreds of patients at the Ionia State Hospital, originally known as the ​Michigan ​Asylum ​for ​Insane ​Criminals, which operated between 1885 ​and ​1976, that we see the real-life consequences for black, primarily male patients.

In looking at the charts of schizophrenic patients from earlier time periods, prior to the beginnings of the civil rights movement, he found that these patients were not seen as particularly violent. While a minority of patients were described as hostile, suspicious or paranoid, these patients were most frequently described as confused, withdrawn, and cooperative. Further, differences between the symptoms of white and black patients with schizophrenia were for the most part insignificant; black patients were more likely to be suspicious, white patients to be suicidal.

Further, it was the assumption that patients, even those remanded to the Hospital because they were classified as criminally insane, were to be treated with the eventual goal of recovery and release. "During the first half of the twentieth century, the idea that even criminally insane persons might improve with treatment and return to their lives functioned as a viable concept. The goal of institutions such as Ionia was not merely to warehouse people, but to recuperate them."

In examining the medical records of Black men admitted in the 50s and early 60s and diagnosed with various personality disorders, Metzl observed that these diagnoses were often changed to one of schizophrenia in the late 60s and early 70s, even though the other contents of the records made it very clear that there had been no change in their symptoms, no new manifestations of disease. Despite the move toward deinstitutionalisation of the period, which led to the downsizing and eventual closing of many hospitals for the mentally ill, these black men were considered dangerous and were among the few patients kept in custody. Indeed, when Ionia Hospital was finally closed, this same group of black men were transferred to another facility for the dangerously insane. At the same time, white women who had been admitted with diagnoses of schizophrenia were being re-diagnosed with depression and released to the care of their families.

Metzl makes it clear - and quotes extensively from representative case files in so doing - that the black men in treatment at Ionia Hospital were not healthy persons unjustly confined. Rather, he is exploring how the ways in which the assessment of the men's condition, and their prospects for release, were affected by changing ideas about blackness, illness and violence.

This is not to suggest that many of the men did not suffer from debilitating mental anguish—indeed, the men lost lives and dreams and loved ones, and were often deeply in need of treatment and care. But the associations implied by that anguish changed over time. In institutional terms, “Negro symptoms” such as hallucinations, delusions, and violent projections came to mean different things. ... Thus did African American men at Ionia develop schizophrenia, not because of changes in their clinical presentations, but because of changes in the connections between their clinical presentations and larger, national conversations about race, violence, and insanity.

Metzl concludes with a brief exploration of the way in which imprisonment has replaced commitment to care facilities for those who enter the justice system with a mental illness.

Many mental-health professionals feel that something is deeply wrong with a system that incarcerates so many mentally ill persons, or that posits prisons as primary treatment centers. The illnesses themselves too often become life sentences. Symptoms so frequently get worse, and the prison rhetoric of containment precludes improvement, recovery, or reintegration. We are not apologists for crime. Yet, most mental-health providers believe that even nightmare scenarios, in which mental illnesses contribute to criminal acts, demonstrate the importance of treating such illnesses proximally, in the community, rather than distally, after the deed is done.
...

The notion of recuperation fell by the wayside as hospitals became prisons. Sentences grew ever longer, moats deeper, and barbed wire sharper. Empathy gave way to fear, fear to anger, and anger ultimately to indifference. “Everything changed when mental health was taken over by Corrections” was a refrain I heard again and again during oral history interviews with staffers who worked at Ionia during the transition to Riverside. “Corrections told us to stop caring for people,” an elderly gentleman who worked as an attendant told me, “even though in some cases we had these people in the hospital for years. Corrections made clear that our job was just to keep them quiet. No one gave a damn about their needs."

This is a difficult but important book, especially in the current rising wave of racial unrest that may well presage a second wave of revolutionary human rights activism among people of colour. One of the most important take-aways from this book for me has been how psychiatry and white fear interacted to reinforce the caricatured social image of black people as violent savages - which is the exact racist imagery that both triggers and is used to excuse the violence against black bodies and black lives we are seeing all around us. This is one part of how these images gain credence and blot out the truth.

The Girl in Saskatoon, Sharon Butala's examination of the life and death of murder victim Alexandra Wiwcharuk, was of interest to me not just because of my fascination with certain elements of crime, violence and the human psyche, but because I, like the author, remember the girl from Saskatoon. Unlike the author, I never met her, but I lived in Saskatoon, a girl of seven years or so, in the aftermath of her death, and even as a child, I knew there was something about this death, mostly talked about in whispers around me, that was important, and unsettling. I had only just moved to Saskatoon, so I have not even a child's reminiscences of what life had been like before Alexandra Wiwcharuk was found dead by the river, but to this day, when there's a reference to her in lists of famous unsolved Canadian murders, or whatever, my breath still catches a bit and I feel something tense up inside. And sometimes I do wonder if it is my vague memories of this death that set me on the path to wondering about other such deaths and the people who deal in them - both the killers and the crime-solvers.

Butala as well talks, in her introduction, about the effect of Alexandra Wiwcharuk's death on her and on the people of Saskatoon - and of the effect that researching that death had on her understanding of why this death is so memorable to those even lightly touched by it.

Forty-four years [after Wiwcharuk's death], at a social gathering in the same city, a well-known writer who had moved to Saskatoon only two years after Alex’s death said to me, “Do you know that Saskatoon people have never forgotten that murder. They all remember it, and they still talk about it.” I did know that, but the way he said it struck a chord deep inside me, plangent, heart-stopping, and catching me by surprise, as if this were news that I was hearing for the first time. His remark had been unprompted, and it was made with such conviction, expressing, at the same time, his surprise; his voice was even tinged with something that might have been awe. I knew that sound well, that mix of surprise, dismay, chagrin, bafflement, and wonder, but in the long years—a good ten by then—of my quest to understand Alex’s murder and the city’s continuing memory of it, and in my dogged gathering of myriad details, I had nearly forgotten. But he is right: it is extraordinary that her death is still remembered.

....When I began to wonder, as a writer, what her true story was, I meant by that only what exactly had happened the night she was killed, who the suspects were, and why no one was ever caught. I thought, if I thought at all, that if I knew those things, it would be enough. But as the years passed and I began to find answers to those questions, the more answers I found, the more inadequate they seemed; the more I discovered, the less I felt I knew. At last I began to see that, interesting as those answers might sometimes be, they failed to satisfy me because they were the answers to the wrong questions.

After some ten years of thinking, talking to people, asking questions, and reading old newspaper reports and whatever documents I could lay my hands on, I had finally come to see that the question that had to be the trenchant one, the real one, almost the only one, encompassing as it does all the other questions from Who did it? to What really happened that night? and Which of the many rumours about that night, about her killer or killers, are true? to How could such evil happen in our decent, small city? was this: Why this constancy of memory? And further: What purpose is served by it? In a world where horrific deaths on a vast scale — three thousand in a moment in New York City, thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq — in a world of suicide bombers, whose purpose, whose need, is it that we should never forget one pretty young woman’s death in Saskatoon? In the end, I began to see that the real question was less about the specifics of her murder and of the investigation, and more about why I needed so badly to know, why no factual answers satisfied me, why I, too, could not forget.

In looking for answers to those questions, Butala looks at the influences surrounding both Wiwcharuk's early life and her own - and those of many people living in and around Saskatoon at the time. The immigrant experience and Ukrainian heritage in Wiwcharuk's family. Growing up in a rural area, barely one step removed from pioneer conditions - if that. A childhood lived against the background of the Second World War. The experience of Otherness, of being at the bottom of the social ladder, shared by the Ukranian Wiwcharuk and the half-French, Roman Catholic Sharon LeBlanc. The veneration of the Virgin Mary common to both Orthodox and Catholic traditions. Butala also evokes the innocence of the times in which Wiwcharuk lived and died.

When we graduated in 1958 there had been no school killings—no Columbine, no École Polytechnique , no Dawson College—no mass murders other than the Holocaust, a full understanding of which we were still trying to absorb, and no serial killers we knew of beyond Jack the Ripper in late-nineteenth-century London, England. We still believed in a righteous war against evil killers such as Hitler, and unquestioningly in the heroism of our soldiers. There was no Vietnam, no Desert Storm, no Afghanistan, and no Iraq (never mind Chechnya, Rwanda, the killing fields of Cambodia). No disappeared. No terrorists, no World Trade Center. No soldiers murdering their prisoners or torturing them, especially not Canadian soldiers. The innocence of the average young Canadian—other than for the incomprehensible but terrifying atomic bomb and the truly incomprehensible hydrogen bomb, and the deliberate murder of six million Jews—was otherwise pretty much intact. Even corruption in governing bodies was considered to be unusual and very limited; corruption belonged to gangs, to the mafia, to the criminal element in general. Everybody else, we thought, could be relied upon to be honest.

Another important element of the times, and the responses to Wiwcharuk's death, was the emphasis on the purity and innocence of unmarried women and the silence on matters of sex and conception. It was a time when "Girls were kept children, their sexuality under the tightest of control, for as long as parents and the rest of society could possibly manage." To go beyond the strict limits placed on a young woman's sexuality was to risk loss of reputation, and the social death of becoming an unwed mother. And yet, because no such limits were enforced upon young men, staying "respectable" was an ongoing struggle.

In the fifties sexual choices were limited: don’t have intercourse or any kind of sexual relations; have intercourse but practise coitus interruptus; or settle for long, sweaty, frustrating, back-seat “petting” sessions. Most of us, in fifties Saskatoon, stuck to the latter. And that meant that some of us were raped. We call it “date rape” now, but in the fifties it didn’t have a name, and it was commonplace—not perhaps, actual rape, although it is likely that there were many more rapes than were ever reported—but certainly it was the rare one of us who had never been on a date where we had to fight physically to keep our virginity. Getting thrown out of a boy’s car, having to walk home, or going home bruised and crying, but with virginity intact—these things happened a lot.

In such an environment - one where murder was virtually unknown, where all the sexuality and crime and corruption was kept hidden, driven underneath social conventions and sequestered in the parts of town where no one decent would be seen, or admit to it, anyway - it was hardly a surprise that some would respond to Wiwcharuk's death by blaming the victim. Rumours circulated that she wasn't the innocent she appeared to be.

There hadn’t been a murder in Saskatoon through our entire childhoods, and it is no wonder that we felt safe, and no wonder that when pretty, smart, decent Alex met her brutal death, the city was stunned, shocked, and beyond horrified. Finding no handy culprit, it turned to Alex as the cause of her own death—she had to have been responsible, because otherwise there would be a lot more deaths in the city, and of pretty young women. And that turned into the rumours of promiscuity, of involvement in drug crime, of “pregnancy without benefit of husband,” of affairs with married men, and of whatever other disreputable behaviour might lead to somebody wanting to kill you. In the minds of many people, unable to believe that a murderer was loose in our city, it had to have been her fault. I suppose it could even be said that if she had brought her murder on herself by her bad behaviour, then it could not be our fault—“our” being the citizens of our city.

In Butala's narrative, Wiwcharuk becomes more than just a young Ukrainian girl, she becomes a symbol of all the constrictions and contradictions that young women of her time, place and background faced, that Butala herself faced, the fetish of innocence and the frustrations of youth and intelligence subordinated to the socially constructed role of femininity. In her last clear memory of Wiwcharuk from their years at the same high school - a technical school intended for the children of the working class, and not for those expected to go on to university - Butala projects all the emotions that would, a few years later, fuel the Women's Liberation Movement.

I sensed that she, too, felt the constriction of our lives: You must get an education, and Nice girls don’t do that, and Do as you’re told, when we had naturally such an abundance, a veritable torrent of life-desiring energy raging through us, at sixteen, at seventeen, at eighteen. We were kept children far too long in those days, girls especially. I think that was the source of our boredom, that and a simmering but buried rage at the absurdity of our position, which we did not recognize intellectually, so well-governed were we, but which dragged at us well below the surface calm of our lives. We yearned for what we thought was freedom, although instead of true freedom, we yearned for love, for a husband, for our very own family, because that was all most of us knew; it was what our culture taught us.

Wiwcharuk is always referred to, in media reports on the murder, as both nurse and "beauty queen." Wiwcharuk had attended nursing school in Yorkton after graduating from high school. In 1961, she moved to Saskatoon and began work at Saskatoon City Hospital. While living in Yorkton, she had won two local beauty contests; her beauty queen career culminated in being chosen the winner of a radio-sponsored contest promoting an appearance in Saskatoon by the singer Johnny Cash - a concert during which he gave Wiwcharuk roses and sang to her the song "The Girl in Saskatoon."

In her book, Butala explores both the realities and the social meanings of both images. In the 1950s, nurses were starched and virginal, handmaidens to the doctor-priests, an image of purity dealing with the corruption of the body, with disease and wounds and bodily fluids and death. Beauty queens of the tine, too, were images of purity, but also of desire, albeit the respectful, honourable desire a man should feel toward the blushing maiden on the threshold of marriage and motherhood.

It seems to me that the very omnipresence of beauty queens and beauty competitions was a response to the prevailing cultural notions about women and their place in society. At some level, I think that this was a genuine effort to show proper reverence for the best in womanhood, an honouring of the idea of female purity, and a natural outgrowth of an age that, the rest of the time, did not much cherish the humanity and individuality of women. But the subtext was always pointing to the perfect “Moms” of television with their hair so well coiffed it looked shellacked, the chaste perfection of their attire, their unflappable calm, their wise love for their husbands and children, and especially, their complete willingness to sacrifice their own lives for them. Implicit in the “Miss Perfect Womanhood” of beauty competitions was the expectation of the marriage and children that would follow...

For Wiwcharuk, there would be nothing to follow. The young nurse in her first job, the pretty girl who was presented to a music legend as "the girl from Saskatoon," was assaulted and killed on the banks of the Saskatchewan River sometime on the evening of Friday May 18, 1962. Her partially buried body was discovered on the night of May 31. Butala relates the known events of Wiwcharuk's last hours and the crime itself with journalistic dispassion.

However, her discussion of the investigation that followed when Wiwcharuk's death finally became known, and the way the police have handled the case throughout the years is raises questions about the long silence of the police who worked the case on many issues related to Wiwcharuk's death and on the lack of information made available to the public. Gaps and discrepancies resulted in rumours early on, which still circulate today, about police cover-ups.

In the end, the book seems to stop without really finishing, a conscious act because, as Butala finally acknowledges:

I had wanted only to tell Alex’s story, her whole story, accurately, once and for all. Now I saw, too, that that was, and had always been, a hopeless task. The story had grown, year after year, it had rippled out farther and farther from Saskatoon, engaging more and more people, even into the next generation of women... until the beginning and the end and the various middles were hopelessly confused, hopelessly complex, hopelessly compromised. If I felt desperate now, it was because, among other things, I saw at last that there truly is no straight line through this story, a neat beginning, a comprehensible middle, a tidy, satisfying end. I saw that the story was not even the one I had thought it was, not the one I had been trying so hard for so long to tell. The story was, instead, about story.

Somebody, a man, battered, raped, and murdered a beautiful young woman and buried her alive in a shallow grave on the riverbank in Saskatoon, in 1962. Catch the murderer or never catch him, this story of evil keeps on touching people, devastating them. I see now that this story, simply, has no end.

Life's been too much of a bitch for me to keep on writing about books much, but I still read, and I may as well at least post lists of what I read this past year. Here's the first list.


Non-fiction


Much of the of the non-fiction I read was a bit of a hodge-podge. Cultural/political studies, feminism, history, biography. All in its way interesting and nothing I regret reading.

Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms

Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender

Adam Kotsko, Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television
Arundahti Roy, Talking to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy
Tim Wise, Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority

Lillian Faderman, Naked in the Promised Land

Alison Weir, The Wars of the Roses
Leanda de Lisle, Tudor: The Family Story