Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease [Hardcover]

In 1980, Charles Wetli---a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions---identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with so-called excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. It was fatal heart failure that killed them, examiners said, not forceful police restraints. InExcited Delirium, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. Exposing excited delirium syndrome’s flawed diagnostic criteria, she outlines its inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Beliso-De Jesús demonstrates that it is yet a further example of the systemic racism that pervades law enforcement in which the culpability for state violence is shifted from the state onto its victims. In so doing, she furthers understanding of the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.USAisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines the emergence of “excited delirium syndrome” in the 1980s, a fabricated medical diagnosis used to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities in the United States.Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University and author ofElectric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion.“At once painful, intimate, and full of insight, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús’s powerful book sits at the intersection of memoir, anthropology, and religious studies. The spirits have guided her pen to offer a prayer that exposes the lie of ‘excilcŒ