Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity from 19th-Century Race Science to the Age of Trump

In 2012, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that clinical tests showed that the beta-blocker drug Propranolol could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Do experiments like these mean that racism is a mental illness? In this talk Sander Gilman traces the genealogies of race and racism as psychopathological categories, exploring the significance that the psychological sciences play in biological understandings of race and racism. Beginning in mid-19th-century Europe, with wide-spread anti-Semitic and racist beliefs, the talk moves across the Atlantic to contemporary America in an attempt to understand how racism became a mental illness. The 19th-century ‘Sciences of Man’— including anthropology, medicine and biology—used race as a means of defining psychopathology. Such assertions about race and madness became embedded within disciplines that deal with mental health and illness up to the age of Trump.

Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over ninety books. His Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity appeared in 2016. His visit to UBC on this occasion has been arranged by the Arts One program.