I feel afraid: black paranoia in the Revista Médica de S. Paulo (1898-1914)

Abstract

The article examines the link between white fear and the psychiatric diagnosis of paranoia at the Juquery Asylum, based on publications in the Revista Médica de S. Paulo (1898-1914). The analysis is developed along four central axes: the role of the journal in consolidating scientific authority in São Paulo; the ideology of whiteness in the post-abolition period; Franco da Rocha’s appropriation of Kraepelin’s degeneration theory; and the pathologization of social conflicts through a clinical case described by Enjolras Vampré in 1910. Methodologically, the study articulates the critical historiography of Collective Health (Breilh, 2013) and Thompson’s historical logic (1981). The results indicate that paranoia operated as a subjective category that converted racial and social inequalities into individual pathology, legitimizing practices of surveillance and segregation. The case of A. T. C. demonstrates how police violence, political dissent, and Afro-diasporic religiosity were translated into delusion, reinforcing racial hierarchies. The article concludes that psychiatry in São Paulo during the First Republic functioned as a racialized technology of government, transforming white fear into medical language and contributing to the reproduction of a pattern of normality and deviance designed to sustain the political, economic, and symbolic privileges of whiteness in postabolition Brazil.