Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake (Hardcover)
ISBN: 9781479829781How white psychiatrists pathologized African American religions
In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists listed “religious excitement” among the most frequent causes of insanity for Black patients. At the same time, American popular culture and political discourse framed African American modes of spiritual power as fetishism and superstition, cast embodied worship as excessive or fanatical, and labeled new religious movements “cults,” unworthy of respect.
Product details
- Publisher: NYU Press
- Publication date: April 29, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 312 pages
- ISBN-10: 1479829781
- ISBN-13 : 9781479829781