Topic: Racial Pseudoscience

1 chapters across the catalog

89: Mass Confusion
2:13:22 - 2:15:49

89: Mass Confusion

Benjamin Rush and the Invention of "Negritude"

Rizk Islam discusses Benjamin Rush, the "father of American psychiatry," who allegedly claimed that Black skin was caused by a mental disease called "negritude," which he described as a form of leprosy. The hosts use this to show how "science" has historically been used to justify segregation and the "othering" of Black Americans through medicalized racism.