American Psychiatry and the Interminable Exigence of Blackpain

Abstract

This essay analyzes the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) responses to George Floyd’s death to critically illuminate the ways that reconciliatory discourses of racial healing deploy blackpain, or representations of black suffering, as a mechanism of emplacement, or temporal orientation. I argue that for American psychiatry, blackpain functions as an interminable exigence that ceaselessly reorients and revivifies its biopolitical project of identifying, measuring, and understanding black bodies. Additionally, I examine how these racialized temporal rhetorics aim to constitute the American Psychiatric Association as a legitimate, progressive public health organization in the face of renewed attention to its historical racism.