As a Black woman who has struggled with a health condition that is limiting, and has worked in the professional serving capacity for people with disab
As a Black woman who has struggled with a health condition that is limiting, and has worked in the professional serving capacity for people with disabilities… I struggled with recent conversations that seemed to assert that Black people do not know about being disabled.
Unfortunately, we have learned that our survival depends on masking pain and suffering.
For instance, a HUGE reason that Black families do not encourage therapy beyond church is their own lived history of a family member going for treatment and never coming back the same, if they came back at all. This isn’t something that they heard about, this is what they lived through.
Slavery-Era “Medical” Diagnoses Used to Control Black People
In the mid-1800s, some physicians created pseudo-medical explanations to justify controlling enslaved people.
One infamous example comes from Samuel A. Cartwright.
He proposed supposed diseases such as:
Drapetomania — the claim that enslaved people who tried to escape were suffering from a mental disorder.
Dysaesthesia Aethiopica — a fabricated condition used to explain resistance, fatigue, or refusal to work.
These ideas were not legitimate science. They were attempts to medicalize resistance to oppression.
Still, they influenced how Black behavior was interpreted by institutions who held the power.
Post-Slavery Asylums and Segregated Mental Hospitals
After the Civil War, many states created psychiatric hospitals.
These institutions were usually segregated.
Black patients often experienced:
- underfunded facilities
- overcrowding
- limited treatment resources
- forced labor as “therapy”
In some Southern states, Black psychiatric patients were housed in separate farm colonies where agricultural labor was expected.
Eugenics and the Targeting of Disabled People
In the early 20th century, the eugenics movement promoted the idea that society should prevent certain people from having children.
People labeled:
- “feeble-minded”
- “mentally defective”
- “unfit”
were often targeted. TARGETED.
One of the most important legal cases in this era was Buck v. Bell.
The ruling allowed forced sterilization of institutionalized people.
Although the plaintiff, Carrie Buck, was white, the policy was later applied disproportionately to Black women, disabled people, and poor populations in several states.
4. Diagnostic Bias in Psychiatry
Researchers studying psychiatry in the mid-20th century noticed a shift.
Black men were increasingly diagnosed with severe psychiatric disorders—especially schizophrenia.
Some scholars argue that during the civil rights era:
- political anger
- distrust of institutions
- resistance to discrimination
were sometimes interpreted as psychiatric symptoms. And I can see that. Post civil rights that still happens. Even today, it is not always easy to find a therapist who can see the difference between hostility and survival. Living in a system that pushes against your very being can shape how you speak, protect yourself, and respond.
Those responses are sometimes mislabeled as “anger” instead of recognized as they truly are-frustration, disappointment, or even resilience.
As writer Audre Lorde reminded us, “Anger is loaded with information and energy.” Sometimes what the world rushes to label as anger is actually the voice of someone who has seen clearly, endured deeply, and refused to disappear.
While the science around this is debated, many researchers agree diagnostic bias has and continues to exist in mental health systems.
5. The Shift from Hospitals to Prisons
By the late 20th century, large psychiatric institutions were closing across the U.S.
This period is known as ‘deinstitutionalization.’
Unfortunately, community mental-health systems were not built quickly enough, made accessible enough, and/or were not considered trusted spaces.
The result:
- many people with serious mental illness ended up without homes.
- police increasingly became first responders to mental-health crises
- jails began housing large numbers of mentally ill individuals
Today, some of the largest mental-health providers in the U.S. are actually county jail systems.
6. Why historians connect these patterns
Across different centuries, vulnerable people—especially those with disabilities or mental illness—have often been handled through institutions of containment rather than care.
At different points in history those institutions included:
- plantations
- asylums
- poorhouses
- segregated hospitals
- prisons
Historians argue the question society repeatedly faces is:
Do we respond to illness and vulnerability with care, or with control?
7. The modern conversation
Today there are growing movements pushing for:
- community-based mental health care
- crisis response teams led by clinicians rather than police
- trauma-informed care systems
- disability justice approaches
- cultural fluency
- MORE multi-disciplinary task forces that include: faith communities, health professionals, child safety advocates, grassroots activists, disability advocates, mental wellness professionals (including ‘alternative health’), child care professionals, teachers, ……Connections
For the people who seem to be “pushing your issue off on the church.” For a long time that was one of the few institutions that could be trusted to be less likely to do further harm to Black, brown, and people from every demographic who needed mental wellness care. And, the care was thoughtful and comprehensive; including responding to mental, physical, advocacy, and care needs for the entire family. Thankfully, it is still this way in many spaces.
I have had the opportunity and honor to serve when faith communities and partner with licensed healing professionals and been able to witness love, healing, and flight beyond obstacles.
Black disabled people have always been here. In the end, healing asks for something very simple yet very rare: to be seen truthfully. Many people have learned to survive within systems that questioned their dignity, their humanity, or their right to exist as they are.
The emotions that rise from that experience are not defects of character. They are signals of a thinking, feeling human being who refused to disappear. Real healing begins when those signals are met not with suspicion or labels, but with curiosity, respect, and care. For every being.
When that kind of understanding is present, survival is no longer mistaken for anger. It is finally recognized for what it has always been: the quiet courage of a life determined to continue.
SEE Also: 20 Black Celebrities With Disabled Children You Didn’t Know About