White Prescriptions?

The Dangerous Social Potential for Ritalin and Other Psychotropic Drugs to Harm Black Males

Terence D. Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317249146
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

For all the debates about black males and their role in American society, there has been little attention to a dangerous and growing trend: the overprescription of Ritalin and other behavioral drugs. This book reveals how and why black males are disproportionately targeted and controlled by American schools in ways that hamper and endanger their educational success. Fitzgerald shows how the government, medical practitioners, and the pharmaceuticals industry have facilitated this oppressive trend, setting it against a larger historical backdrop of racism in American education.

1

History and Context

If you can control a man’s thinking, you don’t have to worry about his actions. If you can determine what a man thinks, you do not have to worry about what he will do. If you can make a man believe that he is inferior, you don’t have to compel him to seek an inferior status, he will do so without being told and if you can make a man believe that he is justly an outcast, you don’t have to order him to the back door, he will go to the back door on his own and if there is no back door, the very nature of the man will demand that you build one.

—Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Mis-education of the Negro (1933)

This first chapter will be a point of origin, describing how and why people of color in the United States, specifically Black males, have been historically targeted by the White racial frame. It will also set the stage as to why I contended in the introduction that special education placement and the push for psychotropic medication in public schools are nothing but a continuation of the scheme to control and punish Black school-age males—to shore up, as it were, the walls. The argument is based upon Joe Feagin’s powerful construct, “the white racial frame,” which he describes as a cognitive frame that evokes negative emotions, actions, and ideas as they relate to a specific population of people of color.¹ He further explains that the framework is then repeated, presented, and expressed unconsciously and consciously toward those who are marginalized in institutions for the benefit of Whites, so that they may gain and hold on to an economic, social, and political edge. In the past, overt uses of oppression and discrimination were experienced by people of color; today, those practices have been rejected and publicly discredited, but they have been replaced with a new system of covert systemic racism.² Contemporary covert racist components continue to be embedded within all major institutions in an effort to immobilize and control Blacks, with a unique emphasis on Black males. Simply put, the White racial frame set in place by Whites in the United States serves as a rationale and justification for the events and actions related to the historical enslavement of Blacks. The construct also describes how contemporary Whites seek to ensure their status of power by relying on the physical and psychological encampment of Blacks and other people of color.

Where exactly is the White racial frame evident in the United States? Examples of this theoretical construct are found not only in public education but in other institutional systems as well. Indeed, all major U.S. institutions are plagued with racism and efforts aimed at the social control of Black males. But before going any further, the definition of control needs to be clarified, for it sets an understanding that will guide the reader throughout the book. First, I use the term control to include both psychological and physical control, as Woodson states in the quotation that opens this chapter. He notes that psychological control embraces the process by which an individual’s mind is controlled in regard to his or her attitude toward self, others, and the environment. Next, physical control necessitates the restraint of one’s body, through physical chastisement, and physical placement within a particular surrounding by others.

The shackles of physical bondage forced on my ancestors no longer bind the ankles of all Blacks. In the modern world, specifically in the United States, the chains have been replaced by more covert tools of control that are embedded in all major institutions in a continued effort to immobilize and control Blacks. More often than not, these tools specifically target Black males in racist and oppressive fashion. This book in no way nullifies Black females or other people of color by suggesting that they do not have a long history of being targeted and oppressed as well. Many dreadful overt and covert instances can be found in the history of Asian Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, and Black females in this country, some of which are unbearable to recount. Today, we see evidence of the racism and oppression that target these groups in the popular media. News coverage and popular television shows sometimes depict these groups in stereotypical ways that perpetuate the social reproduction of racism. Historically, oppressive references can be drawn from the raping and sexual exploitation of Black women and the disproportional earnings of Blacks, Asians, and Latinos/Hispanics. Within local, state, and federal government and educational systems, policies negatively affect and alter the lives of marginalized people of color. But the difference between Black males and other people of color is that Black males have always been seen as a more considerable threat to the psyche of Whites in general and are thus subjected to a more concentrated form of control and punishment on the part of Whites.³

As children, young Black males are in essence forced to compete for opportunities with their hands tied behind their backs on an uneven playing field designed by the dominant White majority, which consciously and subconsciously reproduces subjugation and control. Unlike other people of color and women who have experienced societal progress, today’s Black males, especially young Black males, in comparison to their predecessors in 1960, are more likely to be addicted to drugs, to be high school drop-outs, to interact with the criminal justice system, and to be killed by their own or another Black man’s hands.⁴ In addition, it has been estimated that, as adults, Black females have made advances while Black men have withered in comparison. For example, Ellis Cose (2003) noted that 24 percent of Black females, in comparison to 17 percent of Black males, have gained access to the professional/managerial class. Further, although males outnumbered females attending colleges and universities back in 1970, 56 percent of this particular population was female by 2003. Thirty-five percent of Black females during the same period attended universities and colleges, in comparison to 25 percent of Black males. And Black females have outpaced Black males on all three diploma levels (that is, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees), a trend that has been noted since 1984 by some researchers.⁵

Many people, especially Whites and an increasing number of middle-class Blacks, believe that systemic racism no longer exists in the twenty-first century.⁶ The evidence, however, suggests otherwise: it does exist and in fact tenaciously thrives in our society.⁷ This chapter will illustrate how racism and its perpetual reproduction have continued to assert themselves throughout history in order to maintain the cycle of control targeting Blacks, specifically Black males. In addition, it will show how the effort to control Black males plays out in colleges and universities, in the criminal justice system, and in the media, as well as in the public education system.

CONTROL IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

The Greek civilization was founded on a philosophy that perceived education as a positive agent for the intergenerational transmission of cultural values and norms.⁸ In this process of transmission, the young were educated and their characters were shaped in order for the civilization to flourish and grow. In the early period of the development of the United States, the Founding Fathers in many ways embraced the Greek perspective on the usefulness of education. They saw education as an intricate component that would propel the growth of the Republic and continue its progression.⁹ In the 1830s and 1840s, the common school movement was pushed by the White elites in order to create a dominant culture that could forestall the development of a multicultural society resulting from the influx of immigrants and newly freed Blacks.¹⁰ In addition, education was seen as a vehicle for transmitting and upholding the White Protestant morals upon which the United States was established. In this way, the elites’ racial and cultural superiority over Asians, Blacks, Irish, Native Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, and other people of color and non-Protestants was reinforced in the very foundation of public education.

Unlike the ancient Greeks, early Americans devised a philosophy of education (and went on to build a system to support it) that was initially intended to educate only a particular segment of the population, White males, with the goal of advancing their economic, social, and political interests and thus guaranteeing their dominance in society. Therefore, the education system was created and willed to the elite White males by America’s Founding Fathers, who were themselves elite White males. Even though education later encompassed women’s and minority interests as well, Black Americans have suffered the most resistance from the White-established system in terms of being fully included in all the benefits and freedoms that education offers. In fact, instances of systemic racism and psychological and physical control have been interwoven in the elaborate fabric of education throughout the history of the United States, which has prohibited a truly full inclusion for people of color.¹¹

Remnants of control are still present in the policies and procedures of education. Oppressive systems and people who operate on the grounds of the systemic social reproduction of racism “want distinctions and advantages to be given by birth to those who simply declare themselves by decree to be best.”¹² Today as in the past, teachers and school officials are more likely to treat Black children in a discriminatory fashion and educate them with different classroom-management techniques, employing both conscious and unconscious mannerisms that ultimately impede the academic and social achievements of these students.¹³

In the landscape of American history, we can see examples of control over Blacks in education in the antebellum period, in the later “Black Reconstruction,” and in the civil rights and post–civil rights eras. Through deconstructing these eras, we can learn how efforts to control and oppress Black males specifically have been pursued through a host of practices, policies, and procedures; these have included the use of corporal punishment, special education and alternative educational placement for Black males, and the advocacy of behavioral stimulants to parents of Black males in public education who exhibit unwanted behaviors.

HISTORICAL BARRIERS TO BLACK EQUALITY AND EQUITY

Before examining the issue of psychological and physical control founded in the U.S. education system targeting Black males, a brief history of the efforts to control Blacks in general must be discussed in order to grasp the educational realities confronting Black males today. In general reference to people of color, from the time of the first settlers and colonists to the present, public education has preached equality but practiced racial segregation, discrimination, religious intolerance, and cultural genocide vis-à-vis non-White U.S. inhabitants.¹⁴ Blacks in the United States have had a particularly long and tedious history of being denied educational opportunities. As people brought to America as slaves, Blacks found their access to education was completely denied through White-enacted laws that broadly arrested their ability to fulfill any desires to obtain the fruits offered by education.¹⁵ Moreover, as Heather Williams (2005) and Ron Daniels (2002) discuss, many White elites in slave states enacted laws prohibiting enslaved people from simply being taught to read and write. Slaveowners made every attempt to carry out these antiliteracy laws and stunt slave education. Elite Whites knew that enabling slaves to become educated would threaten their own abilities to control and maintain their system of bondage. Furthermore, slave masters knew that if slaves had been taught to read and write, that would mean their “so-called property had a mind, and writing foretold the ability to construct an alternative narrative about bondage itself. Literacy among slaves would expose slavery, and masters knew it.”¹⁶ Therefore, statutes prohibiting the assembling of slaves as a group or with Whites for “mental instruction” were enacted. Slaves who violated these laws were punished severely, and Whites were imprisoned or fined. At the same time, however, other statutes were passed that allowed slaves to learn math skills as long as they were acquired for the benefit of the slave masters for matters of trade. Regardless, slaves continued to seek out learning on plantations in the South, sometimes with the help of slave masters’ wives who were driven by their faith as Christians, sometimes with the assistance of missionaries, and sometimes with aid from others slaves who had acquired some knowledge of reading and writing.¹⁷

With the end of the Civil War, former slaves saw the South on the verge of change. At the same time, they saw that racism and oppression, ever present since their ancestors’ arrival, were continuing to grow as efforts were strengthened to control them psychologically and physically. During the so-called Black Reconstruction era between 1866 and 1877, the country witnessed an expansion in the rights, privileges, and access given to ex-slaves and other free Blacks, rights that were formerly designated to Whites only.¹⁸ After the Civil War, the former slaves began to participate in government and successfully hold positions of power in that arena.¹⁹ They also voted in elections, partook of the economic market, took ownership of commercial and residential property, and sought the education that had been denied to them as slaves on plantations.

As a result of the protection of the newly passed Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Acts of 1868 and 1875, Blacks for a while enjoyed free and equal access to an education system that was closed to them before the Civil War. Indeed, the public education system that exists in the South today was built on the backs, desires, efforts, and influence of ex-slaves.²⁰ Their passion for education created and shaped a medium for an established public school system for all children in the South. The thirst for schooling affected old and young alike. Blacks at the time understood that by obtaining an education, they obtained access to democracy and to liberation in the United States.²¹ The philosophy of ex-slaves who desired education was marked by a “self-help” ethic. As a collective, Blacks together secured a healthy amount of resources on their own, but at the same time, they and Whites were conscious of the fact that they needed the assistance of those Whites who were willing and financially able to invest in the efforts to educate Blacks; they also needed state and federal governments to provide future funding, protection, and legislation.

At that time, Blacks faced numerous barriers to getting an education. A major obstacle came in the form of conflicts with northern White missionaries and disgruntled southerners. White missionaries and the few White southerners who helped Blacks in their attempts to succeed tried to control the educational processes through a number of restrictions, including determining teacher hiring practices, funding, and manipulating student racial compositions. Moreover, those southerners who helped by providing land for schools often only did so out of self-interest. The elite Whites understood that providing the land for schools near their labor locations enhanced their financial outcomes by having Blacks close by for working purposes. In addition, the curriculum created by Whites was intended to reinforce Blacks’ labor service and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 History and Context
• Chapter 2 The Fueling of Hate and Control
• Chapter 3 The Yellow Brick Pathway to Control
• Chapter 4 Getting By with a Little Help from the Feds
• Chapter 5 Operation Control: Champaign, Illinois
• Chapter 6 Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author