In 2025, a black woman called Harriet Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 American bill. Tubman was an American abolitionist, political activist, and a heroine.
She had been born a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland sometime between 1815 and 1825. At the age of five, she was formally introduced to the realities of her servitude when she was hired to take care of a baby by a white mistress who would fiendishly whip her around the neck and deny her food. Tubman's life did not get any better until she escaped slavery in 1849.
She later become one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad - a network of people who assisted slaves to escape the American South to freedom in the North.
Physician, Samuel Cartwright, used to call Harriet Tubman a drapetomaniac. Samuel Cartwright conjured up a Negro mental illness he called "drapetomania" in 1851. Drapetomania was an unimaginative combination of the Greek words "drapetes" and "mania" which mean "run away" and "madness" respectively. According to Cartwright,
The cause, in most of the cases, that induces the negro to run away from service, is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable. With the advantages of proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented.
In keeping with the pseudo-scientific method, Cartwright coined some probable causes for this "runaway madness". He argued that the root causes of the illness were the slave masters themselves. He described thatslave masters would normally lose their slaves: those who made themselves too familiar to the Negro and those who treated the Negro with excessive cruelty.
To prevent drapetomania, Cartwright suggested that slave-owners treat their slaves kindly, keep them well-fed, give them enough fuel to keep a small fire burning all night, separate them into families, each in its own house and prohibit them from visiting their neighbors.
In short, blacks were given conciliatory, bottom level comforts to lull them into subservience and their society was to be fragmented into alienated nuclear households. This way, the black man never dreamed of being free. Sadly for Cartwright, people like Tubman could not be pacified.
It is easy to dismiss Samuel Cartwright as a delusional bigot but this reduces an institutional shortcoming to a personal weakness.
Speaking to New York Times in 2000, Alvin Poussaint, a clinical professor, convincingly argued, "The culture influences what you consider pathology. Cartwright saw slavery as normative. So when slaves deviated from the norm, he called them mentally ill."
Cartwright's consternation at the Negroes attempts to escape stemmed from his Abrahamic beliefs. He believed blacks were sons and daughters of Cain, born with "knees more flexed or bent than any other kind of man". The fate of blacks was to bend the knee to the white man and any attempt to frustrate this divine plan was madness.
Science was only an instrument to be used to protect God's plan. Cartwright was not unlike eugenicists who medicalized any race that was not white and even went to the extent of sterilizing women of "feeble-minds". He is also the forbear of Nazis who engineered the Holocaust on account of racial superiority. The worrying fact is that scientific racism still exists as Angela Saini proves in her seminal work, Superior: The Return of Race Science. Racism is still contaminating science with its bias and bigotry.
Header Image: (Michael Rosato)