The Protest Psychosis by Jonathan M. Metzl

Author:Jonathan M. Metzl [Metzl, Jonathan M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8593-6
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2009-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

To see this schizophrenia between being American and being alienated from America, well, that alienation has reached a point where a lot of people value it . . . a lot of young Negro intellectuals are not interested in integration in the sense of making a head-long flight of disappearing into white America. It’s like being asked to take up residence in a burning building. They’re interested in having society transformed so it’s a better thing.40

Readers familiar with African American philosophical thought will recognize that definitions of schizophrenia in the black press, and in civil rights rhetoric more broadly, complicate the notion that psychiatric definitions of the term trickled down into American society as if by force of gravity. To be sure, King, Grier and Cobbs, Jones, and others knowingly or unintentionally referenced the DSM’s assertion that schizophrenia was a disease of projection, anger, and hostility. But their usage also invoked much earlier intellectual formulations.

For instance, as is well known, W.E.B Du Bois described an African American double consciousness in ways that presaged King’s call for an internal civil war on one hand and Carmichael’s survive-at-any-cost mentality on the other. In an infamous 1897 Atlantic magazine essay and later in his 1903 masterwork, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois described double consciousness as a requisite “two-ness” of being “an American, a Negro; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” As he wrote,

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