Humanities Forum — Aisha Beliso-De Jesús: Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease

Humanities Forum Lecture with Aisha Beliso-De Jesús
Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease
This event is part of the Spring 2026 Humanities Forum

The Humanities Forum presents Aisha Beliso-De Jesús, Olden Street Professor of American Studies and Chair of the Effron Center for the Study of America, Princeton University, who will speak on Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease.

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. In Excited 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.

Admission is free.

The Humanities Forum is presented by the Dresher Center for the Humanities. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Critical Disability Studies Minor; the Department of Africana Studies; the Department of American Studies; the Dresher Center’s Disability Studies Working Groups in the Humanities; the Latin American Studies Minor; and the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health.