Excited Delirium:
Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease
By Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús (Duke University Press)
Aether does not exist. The Michelson–Morley experiment producing a negative result is considered the mortal wound, and the need for it in the theory of physics was displaced by Einstein’s Special Relativity. It pops up as an idea from time to time, both from crackpots but also serious scientists, in the case of the latter referring back to it as a way of conceiving a new theory to replace or supplement Relativity (and there is some suggestion that Einstein did similar about Relativity in the first place). But it is outdated and incorrect science.
Excited delirium is a pseudoscientific concept used to justify police killings, generally of Black men, and more generally to reduce the value of Black and Brown lives by inventing an aliment that allows for deaths that require no further research or examination. It comes out of a 1981 paper by Fishbain* & Wetli. It became forensic pathology conventional wisdom. Wetli promoted it, and others have taken up his standard, but it is generally discredited, in part due to the increased (and recorded) visibility around police violence towards Black people. In short: excited delirium is fake.
It is also the title of this book. It is not the subject of the book, which is more of a memoir. The author makes this point in a footnote in tying this book with other academic works that include the lived experiences of the authors and the allegory (put a pin in it) of the world for Black researchers as the haunted world. It is the value of lived experience and how it matters. Scholars revealing their emotional investment as part of a matter that touches upon their identity is not only a sort of useful reminder that these matters do concern identifiable people rather than existing as cosmic forces, but is valuable to the scholarly project by including a missing perspective necessary for good scholarship.
Here, as the book becomes the author’s subjective experience of doing the research, it ceases to be about the topic. I feel that I learned more about exited delirium, the why of its wrongness and its place in the history of racist science in doing reading to prepare to write this review rather than in the book itself. I am not prepared to defend dead racists who literally perpetuated death and injustice, but the basic reportage here is bad: substantially built from unsupported conjecture, with disingenuous language, and occasional points of contradiction. There are unsupported or anomalous claims, bad takes (the Treyvon Martin chapter in particular), and irrelevant digressions.
I do not include in the above the author receiving messages from the dead. Santería is a theme, because the author is a practitioner, and Wetli…well, he held himself out as an expert. Again, not interested in defending the guy, and there is undoubtedly systemic racism in the mix, but it is my primary example of the book failing in its task. I do not feel like there is a sufficient vetting to get to ascribe motives and make conclusions about him like the author does. I think that the author realizes this in the contradictory way she discusses him. And if the author provided a solid argument here with a more causal as opposed to elemental relationship, it might work well. But the book does not do that work.
I do not like the religiosity. I do think that it has a place in research. I do not thing that it has a place in argumentation. A Creationist or Dominionist could plow the same row, with the awkward concession of saying that they are wrong because of the results, not on the reasoning.
It is telling that when the author introduces an unnamed skeptic into the work, who, as I do, agree with her overall results but not her argument, they are not persuaded. They have a Damascene moment. (I thought “‘I Don’t Call That Much Of An Argument.’”)
So, I cautiously put it to the side in this part of the discussion. It is part of the list of the epistemology of the traditionally marginalized that needs re-balancing, and a believer should be the one to discuss that part of Wetil’s writing. And I hate to put it like this, but folks can believe what they want to believe, more or less until the point that it starts harming others, (and even, sometimes, then, considering how often people want to be harmed).
I do include as bad the book’s position on science, or positive science as the book has it. The author treats science as a project that has denied the provability of the supernatural as an act of white supremacy. The text makes the sort of claims that ought to make a professor lose tenure1: Spiritualism was unfairly maligned because it was women making the claims. Quantum physics has proven the existence of the supernatural world. The ether is out there. Madam Blavatsky did nothing wrong.
The great tragedy of something like excited delirium is something like this, where pseudoscience breeds pseudoscience. Here, it grants white supremacy control over the state of play. It concedes to their position, and instead tries to carve out prestige in the put down. Your value is not in your lived experience, but in the lies they tell.
This might have flown in 1996, but today anti-science thinking is an existential threat. Climate change denial, vaccine opposition, the persisting race and gender science bunkum – it is just not okay anymore, not from smart people. And I know that it is bad form to be offended for someone, but there are so many contributions to the sort of science that the author attacks from outside of white society and from the traditionally marginalized within white society.
Anyway, there are also a lot of supported and supportable claims. Cynically, this is a gambit to defang criticism, and I feel like most of the criticism of the book will be authoritarian apologia and racist fantasy. But there is a lot of bathwater and not much baby. It complicates any review. I think that the surest way to look at it is that the autobiographical aspect is fine with moments of excellence. But the author misread the how of a book written in that style, and in doing so created a book with inalienable criticisms.
My thanks to the author, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Duke University Press, for making the ARC available to me.
- And to be explicit, these are not facetious. These are in the book. ↩︎
CITATION HEEDED 