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In 1945 Negro Digest published an essay by the renowned writer Zora Neale Hurston titled "Crazy for This Democracy." Hurston drew upon the metaphor of disease to critique the United States' failure to deliver democracy either abroad or at home, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's wartime rhetoric had promised. As Hurston wittily suggested, it would be more accurate to refer to the president's "arsenal of democracy" as the "arse and all of democracy," as the US military moved to shore up teetering imperial powers against indigenous movements fighting for decolonization.1 For Hurston, Jim Crow laws were symptomatic of the larger disease of racial discrimination, just as the bumps and blisters of smallpox (with which she compared them) were the visible signs of the disease and not the disease itself.2 Smallpox resonated for black writers like Hurston and Ralph Ellison as a particularly apt metaphor for the diseased state of American democracy: African Americans in the South were particularly susceptible, and it manifested itself both in the blood and on the epidermis, critical sites of racial taxonomies-what Frantz Fanon would term the "racial epidermal schema"-thus making visible the internal scarring leftby contact with the diseased body politic.3 In Ellison's Invisible Man, one of the asylum patients in the Golden Day is "a short pock-marked man," a former doctor and World War II veteran, whose craziness is the result of prolonged exposure to the hypocrisy of fighting for democracy in a Jim Crowed army.4 Smallpox and racism were highly communicable diseases, and Hurston prescribed "a shot of serum that [would] kill the thing in the blood," specifically, the immediate repeal of Jim Crow.5 Unfortunately, the United States seemed reluctant to take Hurston's prescription, which she chalked up to a psychological case of mass delusion among white Americans.
Using disease as a metaphor, Hurston illuminated how segregation was not just about the control of black bodies-politically, socially, and economically- but about the psychological control of black minds. Jim Crow laws led to the "unnatural exaltation of one ego, and the equally unnatural grinding down of the other," as they inculcated among whites a belief in their racial superiority and simultaneously persuaded blacks of their inferiority.6 Thus Hurston used the term crazy to signify two different states of mind:...