Amerikkka Made US Crazy

Description

archival print with hand-touched elements, unique 1/1 | includes white frame

Cause’ actually the land of the free and the home of the brave, has meant the land of the tree and the home of the grave for so many of us.                                                                                     – -Fannie Lou Hamer

The history of what America has done to Black Americans is enough to make us “Crazy.”  In the United States, scientific racism was used to justify slavery to appease the moral opposition to the Atlantic slave trade.

Black men were described as having “primitive psychological organization,” making them “uniquely fitted for bondage.” Even at the turn of the 20th century, leading academic psychiatrists claimed that “negroes” were “psychologically unfit” for freedom.

And as late as 1914, drapetomania was listed in the Practical Medical Dictionary. Furthermore, after slavery was abolished, Southern states embraced the criminal justice system as a means of racial control. “Black codes” led to the imprisonment of unprecedented numbers of black men, women and children, who were returned to slavery-like conditions through forced labor and convict leasing that lasted well into the 20th century.

Understanding the past enables new ways of addressing current implications and identified barriers, including how schizophrenia became a “black disease,” why prisons emerged where hospitals once stood, and how racial disparities continue to exist in the mental health system today.                                                 – b. Robert Moore