Black and Blue. John Hoberman
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ways of life. The various forms of black medical “hardiness”—dermatological, neurological, surgical, venereal, cardiac, reproductive, and more—all presume a more primitive (and less complex) human type that is biologically different from the civilized white man. This racial doctrine of biological (and medical) difference is the ideological dimension of the “colonial medicine” described at length in a later section of this book.
The racial anthropology of the nineteenth century and the colonial medicine to which it gave birth are the prototypes of the modern-day racial medicine described previously in capsule form. The racial anthropology of this era was also an evolutionary doctrine that posited a developmental hierarchy predicated on a polarity between racially inferior blacks and racially superior whites. A representative text of this genre is “On the Negro's Place in Nature,” published in 1864 by James Hunt, PhD, president of the Anthropological Society of London. “The Negro race, in some of its characters, is the lowest of existing races,” he writes, “while in others it approaches the highest type of European; and this is the case with other savage races. We find the same thing in the Anthropoid Apes, where some species resemble man in one character, and some in another.”170 This Victorian Age theme of differential human evolution and its related analogy between the “lower” races and the great apes or other animals persisted for many years in the thinking of Euro-American anthropologists and medical men.
This evolutionary theory of human racial differences also appears in later medical publications on race. In 1925, The Journal of the Michigan State Medical Society published an article endorsing the view that “the female negro pelvis is similar in many respects to the pelvis of the female gorilla,” arguing that “it seems but logical to conclude that the negro pelvis shows a reversion toward the type found in the lower animals.”171 The 1929 volume of the Transactions of the American Gynecological Society includes a casual endorsement of the idea that “the negro lies nearer to the common stem than does the European and so is nearer to the childhood of the race.”172 In 1939, the flagship journal of American psychiatry allowed a Columbia University psychologist to propose in its pages “that in the negro there are characteristics approaching the apes with a greater variability of form and structure.”173
Simpleminded pseudo-Darwinian reasoning also equated black human beings with darker kinds of animals. Researchers at the University of Oklahoma in 1925 conducted a pharmacological experiment on the premise “that black feathers in chickens were the genetic equivalent of African heritage in humans.”174 Readers of the 1928 volume of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology were told that, “It is natural to associate the low death rate of negroes from skin diseases and skin cancer with the presence of large amounts of pigment. Among animals there are many cases in which darker varieties are relatively immune to various diseases.”175 Two contributors to the 1930 volume of JAMA compared black and white babies with black and white rats on the premise that skin color corresponds to a deeper biological analogy.176 Other publications suggested that “evolutionary changes in teeth” had left black dental development at a primitive stage.177
That such primitive pseudoscientific fantasies about racial differences passed editorial review at flagship journals like JAMA and Psychiatry during this period is a commentary on how influential some of the categories of Victorian racial anthropology remained well into the twentieth century. Nor should we assume that this influence was extinguished on account of the racial watershed marked by the Second World War. The racial integration of professional sports and the military services were landmark social and political events that were catalyzed by the drafting of African American men into the racially segregated armed services. But these and other social reforms such as school integration (1954) and voting rights (1964) did not remove the racial folklore inside people's heads.
The ignorance that results from this information vacuum helps to account for the shock and surprise that attend the scandals caused by prominent people who finally succumb to the power of racial fantasies that would have been better left unspoken. It is significant that these awkward events entangle liberals as well as right-wing ideologues like William Bennett and Patrick Buchanan, who once wrote that black crime “is, like sickle cell anemia, a ghetto sickness”—as vicious an example of racist medical defamation as our society has heard since the days of Jim Crow.178 When presidential candidate Jimmy Carter suddenly endorsed the “ethnic purity” of American neighborhoods in April 1976, he showed—as the case of Francis Lawrence did twenty years later—the fine emotional line that can separate professed racial enlightenment from the unreformed thought habits that lurk within.179 It is a measure of our racial civility that the threshold of socially acceptable discourse is seldom breached in public life. But not all violations of this standard result from heretical impulses that break through the ideological self-discipline of those who profess racial equality. We must distinguish between those whose principled self-restraint has been breached by the sudden urge to express a socially forbidden racial thought, and others who ignore or disdain the social rules that govern public talk about racial differences. These are the commentators who can slip into a nineteenth-century racial idiom and wonder what all the fuss is about.
The influential official or policy maker of this kind who appears oblivious to the unofficial rules of racial discourse is useful for our purposes, because he allows us to see how racial folklore can still shape the thinking that goes into medical policy making. A notorious case of this kind erupted in February 1992 when Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, then administrator of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, commented on the so-called Violence Initiative that was being sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services. The goal of this program was to develop pharmacological or other therapeutic interventions against male violence that was implicitly identified as violent behavior by young blacks. Dr. Goodwin's remarks made it seem as though he had traveled back in time and embraced the mentality of a racial “ethnologist” like James Hunt. According to Goodwin's evolutionary model, the male violence of the black American ghetto was a reversion to the chaos of the primeval African jungle and its primitive inhabitants. Male monkeys, he said, are violent and hypersexual, suggesting “some interesting evolutionary implications.” The progeny produced by their frequent copulations will “offset the fact that half of them are dying.” He then proposed an analogy with “inner city areas” and “the loss of some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up…. Maybe it isn't just the careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities, jungles.”180 The medical and social implications of the Violence Initiative were clear. As the African American political scientist Ronald Walters put it: “If there is a reason for this kind of research, the aim is to find a drug. And if you begin using drugs to pacify young black males, as is often done with Ritalin for hyperactivity, you're creating a regime of social control.”181 Goodwin's grossly stereotyping and speculative sociobiology provoked both support for the project and a bitter backlash.182 This controversy made it clear that the evolutionary racism of the late nineteenth century could still play a role in late twentieth-century thinking about race among influential psychiatrists.
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