Obama-Mania and Negro-Mania

In this article, an African American historian of mental illness argues that the recent rhetoric which describes Barak Obama’s followers as being caught up in Obama-mania is connected to racist ideas from the civil war era that slaves were more inclined to mental insanity than whites. The author links this idea to the notion that blacks were not seen as able to make moral judgments, because they were morally insane, and states that this belief was reflected in the Dred Scott finding. He also discusses how Negro-Mania, which was a medical term invented to describe a white who is obsessed with the slavery question and was used to caste doubts on the sanity of abolitionists, is linked to the current phrase Obama-Mania.