The origins and definition of the word ‘Americanitis’ are opaque at best. It is generally believed to have appeared in medical journals of the late nineteenth century, describing a particular nervous ailment found in the inhabitants of the United States of America. Thought to cause disease, heart attack, nervous exhaustion, and even insanity, Americanitis was seen as a serious threat to the American public. In fact, in 1925, Time Magazine reported that Americanitis was responsible for claiming up to 240,000—white—lives a year.[1] Nevertheless, with the passing of the Great Depression, its position as a legitimate disease faded in the public eye. Now virtually forgotten, I wish to resurrect it, and propose that it be used to describe a disease that truly does claim lives: white supremacy.
Currently, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ‘Americanitis’ as ‘excessive nervous tension’ and an ‘enthusiastic or aggressive advocacy of Americanism’.[2] In my reinterpretation, I would like to expand upon this definition to describe Americanitis as a structural disorder which plagues American society at large, as opposed to a disease that merely infects individuals. I will argue it is an entanglement of power, fear, and amnesia that writhes under the surface of the American landscape. The foundation upon which white supremacy stands is a polarised sense of white identity as virtuous yet vulnerable to the supremacy of Black identity, which is regarded as impure and violent. It reinforces hierarchies by instilling a fear—indeed, an ‘excessive nervous tension’—of Black assault on white structures, people, and spaces. It fabricates a link between the upward mobility achieved by Black Americans with the violent invasion of white spaces. What belies its tactical purpose is that it has been repeatedly harnessed by white supremacist hate groups— ‘aggressive advocates of Americanism’—to endorse racial violence as a defence strategy. Paired with mass media and its falsified depictions of Black violence, they seek to use this to justify attacks against Black communities and their spaces.
Mutative expansions of Americanitis have cycled since Reconstruction. In the twentieth century, cinema, television, and the Internet have emerged as effective platforms to spread a fear of encroaching Blackness through representations of architectural destruction. Cinema’s maturation in the early 1910s transformed the Neoclassical architecture of Southern plantations into a symbol of white supremacy and confederate nostalgia. Half a century later, at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the television was used to associate the Civil Rights Movement to the dread of imminent nuclear annihilation of racially segregated neighbourhoods by Soviet forces. Half a century after that, during the Obama era and the Trump era, the Internet and its social media platforms have allowed an association to be constructed between increased diversity, as well as movements like Black Lives Matter, with social discord and detriment to America’s structures. In this essay, I will explore each of these expansions, and the resulting white supremacist violence, in an effort to show how the through-line of Americanitis has been an essential tool for spreading and maintaining white supremacy. I will conclude with the recent white supremacist attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, to illustrate how this ‘disease’ very much affects the nation to the present day.
