Are Racists Crazy?
How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity
- Sander L. Gilman - Professor of Psychiatry, Emory University
- James Michael Thomas - Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Mississippi
In Are Racists Crazy? Sander Gilman and James Thomas trace the idea of race and racism as psychopathological categories from medieval times right up to the present. The book explores in detail the means by which racism became equated with mental illness. Based on historical, archival, and content analysis the book provides a rich account of how the disciplines that deal with mental health and illness, including anthropology, medicine, and biology have used ideas about race and madness as a means of defining psychopathology.
An illuminating and riveting presentation of the discourse on racism, antisemitism, and psychopathology, Are Racists Crazy? connects past and present claims about race and racism, showing the dangerous implications of this specious line of thought for today.
“Gilman and Thomas…study the deep structures of racism, not only in plunder, privilege, and antipathy for the ‘other,’ but also in the scientific frameworks that seek to explain ‘otherness’….Are Racists Crazy? sheds new light on such varied matters as implicit bias and authoritarian populism. Most important, this book unveils the inescapable political connections between race and science.”
“Gilman and Thomas…study the deep structures of racism, not only in plunder, privilege, and antipathy for the ‘other,’ but also in the scientific frameworks that seek to explain ‘otherness’….Are Racists Crazy? sheds new light on such varied matters as implicit bias and authoritarian populism. Most important, this book unveils the inescapable political connections between race and science.”