“Who Shall Dare Compute in Dollars and Cents the Worth of One Mind!”: Mental Health, Disability, Addiction, and Jim Crow Laws in North Carolina, 1866–1967

Abstract

What do laws concerning Jim Crow racial oppression and mental health, disability, and addiction care have in common? How might an existing dataset of historical North Carolina General Assembly laws reveal legal intersections between racial oppression and mental health/disability/addiction care and control? This paper argues that, at the same time that North Carolina lawmakers used legislation to enact white supremacist ideologies, they also used similar tactics to inform how people marginalized because of their psychiatric diagnosis, disability, and/or substance abuse disorder, could be both cared for and controlled. In this paper, I present findings from a graduate research fellowship with On The Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance. On The Books (https://onthebooks.lib.unc.edu/) is a collections-as-data project of the University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that used machine learning and scholarly expertise to produce a computationally-actionable dataset of North Carolina General Assembly Laws passed between 1866 and 1967. Both my dataset and the On The Books datasets are publicly available through the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR). My research drew on the On The Books datasets to create a new dataset of North Carolina’s disability, addiction, and mental health care laws during the same period, also publicly available through the CDR. I then conducted an exploratory analysis of these laws to better understand how they intersect with Jim Crow laws and what implications those intersections might reveal about North Carolina’s history of white supremacist policies. This paper offers one example of the research opportunities made possible by libraries’ efforts to make historical data publicly accessible and computationally-actionable.