In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Judith Weisenfeld. Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Her book is Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Judith Weisenfeld: Black Religion in the Madhouse traces the emergence in the late-nineteenth century US of a psychiatric discourse that pathologized Black religion – especially Africana religious practices like conjure and ecstatic forms of Black Protestant worship – as a precipitating cause of mental illness. It explores how white psychiatrists’ racialized theories of Black people’s purported religious excess, “superstition,” and susceptibility to charismatic religious leaders contributed to commitment to state hospitals and shaped the practices of care within institutions. In slavery’s wake, the dominant white psychiatric theory in the US presented Black people as more prone to “religious excitement” because of what psychiatrists claimed were innate racial characteristics that demonstrated a fundamental unfitness for freedom. Even as psychiatric theory changed over the course of the twentieth century, many of these ideas about Black religion as a psychologically disabling factor persisted in medical approaches to race and mental health.
Current discourse about an expansive mental health crisis is located in a social climate in which mental illness has been criminalized and people with mental illness are often confined in America’s jails and prisons. We also know that people with mental illness make up a significant percentage of those shot and killed by police in the US and that a disproportionate number of these victims are Black. I hope that Black Religion in the Madhouse contributes to more nuanced understanding of the historical background to racialized criminalizing of mental illness and the intersections of anti-Blackness, economic precarity, and mental illness. Religion may not be an obvious factor in the contemporary story, but a case like that of Sonya Massey, who was shot and killed in 2024 by a white Springfield, Illinois sheriff’s deputy, is striking. The deputy claims that he interpreted her religious exclamation, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” as a sign of derangement and a prelude to violence, prompting him to shoot in self-defense. The book provides a history of how ideas about race and religion became entangled in framings of Black people as mentally unsound and as social dangers.
2. What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
In Black Religion in the Madhouse, I highlight several Black community activists in the 1940s and 1950s who joined with Black clergy and the first substantial cohort of Black psychiatrists to shift theory and practice in Black mental health care. Black psychiatrists at the Tuskegee Veterans Hospital refuted theories about innate “race traits,” including supposed religious dispositions, and turned attention to how social environment, and particularly racism, could foster the development of mental illness. Activists like Rosa Kittrell mobilized her connections to churches and religious organizations to advocate for community based mental hygiene clinics to address the lack of access to psychotherapy in Black communities and intervene to avoid institutionalization. Activists and community organizers have long addressed health disparities that stem from anti-Black racism, unequal access to treatments, and disparate care and have pioneered ways to address these at the macro and micro levels. I hope that learning about Kittrell and others might help activists and organizers locate their work in a longer history of community based responses to criminalization and institutionalization.
The book also shows that, even in a context in which the value of religious freedom is enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, racialized conceptions of religion – and, in this case, racialized through medical pathologizing – shape understandings of what constitutes religion itself and what kinds of religious beliefs and practices merit protection. The norming of certain kinds of religion in American politics and public life has been enabled by marginalizing others. Such religious othering is obvious in the most overt forms, but medical pathologizing has been less well understood. I hope activists and community organizers might become even better attuned to the more subtle ways racialized medical discourses can function to constrain the free exercise of religion.
3. We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
It is common to imagine that the consolidation of scientific and medical authority displaced religious understandings of health and disease in the nineteenth and twentieth-century US and that, for psychiatrists and other physicians, science and religion stood in opposition to one another. In working to learn more about the white southern physicians who developed theories about Black religion as both a symptom and sign of disordered minds, I found that, not only did many have personal or family experiences as enslavers of Black people, but most were also active and engaged in mainstream Protestant churches.
Late nineteenth and early-twentieth century white psychiatric theorists of Black religions and mental normalcy brought religious commitments as Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians, for example, to their treatment of patients. Their personal religious sensibilities about what constitutes true, orderly, and socially beneficial religion grounded their assessments of their Black patients’ religious beliefs, expressions, and institutions as superstitious or overly emotional. I came to see this story not as a contest between the authority of science and medicine, on the one hand, and the religious worlds of formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants, on the other, but of two religiously informed approaches to health and society engaging one another on a field of unequal power. Remaining alert to how religious understandings persisted through the changing course of race science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave me a new perspective on the relationship of religion, race, and science that I hope readers will find useful.
4. Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
My work on this book has benefited enormously from scholars focused on race and medicine, especially Rana Hogarth, Diedre Cooper Owens, Dorothy Roberts, Keith Wailoo, and Harriet Washington, to name a few, and from the recent literature on African Americans and psychiatry by scholars like Jonathan Metzl, Mab Segrest, and Martin Summers. In the area of race and religion, Sylvester A. Johnson, Kathryn Gin Lum, and Terence Keel have had a profound influence on my work, and a host of pioneering Black Studies scholars, including Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Rinaldo Walcott, have inspired me.
5. Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
Recovering the stories of Black patients in Black Religion in the Madhouse was an especially challenging part of the research process because the archival record privileges the voices of white doctors and hospital officials, police, judges, employers, etc., and the frameworks of medical racism are so prominent and powerful in the written record. The texture of patients’ lives, family and community connections, and spiritual aspirations are fleeting in the textual materials I examined, and, in many cases, records were discarded or obscured by health privacy regulations.
As I have navigated these challenges, I have been drawn to work that uses personal and family history to tell larger stories about Black life in the US. Crystal Wilkinson’s culinary memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks, is a beautiful book, both in word and image, that foregrounds the histories of Black Appalachians and of Wilkinson’s own family, going back generations. The kitchen is a site of spiritual power for Wilkinson, and the recipes she shares evoke connections with her ancestors and highlight the importance of mobilizing a range of sources, such as food and foodways, in addition to textual ones.
Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, A Black Family Keepsake also demonstrates the world of stories contained within material culture. I was profoundly moved when I saw the sack, passed down through generations, on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Embroidery on the fabric preserves the story of nine-year-old Ashley, separated forever from her mother Rose, and left with the sack containing a dress, some pecans, a braid of Rose’s hair, and “filled with my Love always.” Miles’s book fleshes out Rose and Ashley’s story and the story of the sack in a memorable way. With the current presidential administration’s efforts to erase public representation of Black life and history, I’m drawn to the need for us to reclaim and tell seemingly small stories in the face of mounting opposition to Black presence.
Roberto Sirvent is the editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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