Race Thinking and Racism Become the Norm

Abstract

This chapter considers the overt, unashamed nature of white supremacist thinking that characterised the Victorian age and the years leading up to it, as European power came to dominate most of the world. It traces how racist thinking carried over to become a driving force in the colonial project in Asia and Africa, following on the tradition set during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Thus racism informed the work of psychologists and psychiatrists during the latter part of the nineteenth and at least the first half of the twentieth centuries, persisting to the present in a variety of ways. The chapter covers ways in which race matters were dealt with in nineteenth-century sociology, psychology and psychiatry. It describes the intimate connections between eugenics and psychology, and the racist ideologies evident in the work of eminent psychiatrists and psychologists. Examples are given of race-specific (mental) illnesses diagnosed among enslaved Africans and racist theories about racial diversity of mental health and mental illness, especially the excessive labelling of black people with the schizophrenia diagnosis.