There are some things you can’t show, things you can’t share once you’ve seen them, so you turn them into a poem, and you can barely do that. Because they happened in the state you’re from. Because they happened in the state mental hospital where your mother worked. Because they happened while everyone looked away. Because we were not much better here in the United States than the Nazis were where those sent to mental hospitals were concerned.

Because in a day room in Taft, Oklahoma, we let a little boy sit wet with his own excrement or urine or blood or all three, a strip of white cloth cinching his arms to his neck. Because he’s not the only boy or the only man in the photo. Because this is what we did to human beings in the 1940s but also now or again or now and again with a new face, a new flavor, a new reason, from a new hatred, a new greed, a new form of consciouslessness.

What did I leave out? That the boy was Black. Everyone in the photo was Black. This was at the State Hospital for the Negro Insane. That’s what they called it. Are you sick yet? Do you want to turn away? You already have, from all of us, as the cages are built in Florida, as we find new reasons to cage. Will PETA come to the rescue? People are animals, too, and being treated worse than animals.

People who cage people are animals in a different sense of the word. They should start an organization called People for the Obliteration of People. POP for short. It has a ring to it. It’s weaponized.

Here, drink from this metal cup. Here, sit on this wooden bench. Here, look through this barred window for the rest of your life. Here, here. Here, here.

The photos I’m looking at include one of the back ward at the hospital where my mother worked in Norman, Oklahoma. These are not easy images to see, but this history matters. What’s been happening to people like me has been happening to people like me for a long time. This country could learn a lot from this history as its pinfeathers break our democracy’s skin.

On the desegregation of American psychiatric institutions and structural racism in American psychiatry. Link in comments.

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Oklahoma,1964: Taft State Hospital was an all-Black facility, with an all-Black staff, located in an all-Black town. In 1940, its 738 patients were cared for by three psychiatrists (including the superintendent), three nurses, and an unknown number of direct care staff, who apparently all lived in one room. In 1949, Oklahoma consolidated the state hospital with the Institute for Colored Blind, Deaf, and Orphans and the Training School for Negro Girls, creating one large facility for Blacks with all manner of clinical needs. Oklahoma desegregated its public facilities in 1964. Rather than admit white patients to its state hospital for Black patients, as most of the other states would do, Oklahoma transferred the Black patients to its two other (all white) state hospitals. Taft was closed in 1970 and converted into a correctional facility, thus confounding in the public’s mind people with mental illness and criminals. (Some state hospitals have converted some of their units into correctional facilities, leading some people to think that psychiatric patients are being held behind multi-layered, barbed wire, razor-topped fences.)