A valuable contribution to the history of mental health care and of the racist applications of medicine.
A penetrating study of color-line injustices in the realm of psychiatry.
Some 25,000 bodies lie buried behind the Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, the world’s “largest graveyard of disabled people,” part of the world’s largest mental asylum. Founded in 1842 and operational until a decade ago, it was part of a system that, as with other institutions in the Deep South, was divided by race. Mentally ill (or so declared, at any rate) African Americans were put to work in fields and factories and deprived of books, writing materials, and personal items; mentally ill whites were given more leeway and greater privileges. Social justice activist Segrest interrogates the records to give specific weight to such charges. She notes, for example, that when it came to calico dresses at the time of the supposedly separate-but-equal tenet of Plessy v. Ferguson, “white women got one thousand and colored women got a negligible thirty-five.” (The term “colored,” she explains in the opening pages, is a term of art of statisticians of the period, as are such designations as “imbeciles” and “lunatics.”) Valuably, the author also examines psychiatric files to investigate presumed offenses that brought African Americans to Milledgeville in the first place. Many women, for their part, were hospitalized with what would now likely be characterized as PTSD following physical abuse, rape, and other assaults. The hospital operated on “modern” theories promulgated by specialists who were likely in the early 20th century to advocate sterilization of the mentally ill in the interest of eugenics, with Georgia standing at “the epicenter of race and psychiatry” in inflicting this punishment on African Americans disproportionally. For those who suppose that all is well now, Segrest concludes, pointedly, that the “struggle for equity in medicine and health in the United States and globally is not won, and may not be for a while.”
A valuable contribution to the history of mental health care and of the racist applications of medicine.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62097-297-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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