Mental disability - in the extent that diagnosis has existed as a way to define mental disability - has always had diagnosis interplay with racism. Schalk notes that Jonathan Metzel's work "The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease" traces the socio-political circumstances that lead to the American Psychiatric Association changing the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia - a change that lead from schizophrenia being a condition considered a common and benign diagnosis predominantly given to white housewives to a violence mental disability assoicated with Black men in civil rights activism.

Diagnosis criteria for mental disabilities construct norms of abledmindness that are muilt on what white male middle class norms assume is appropriate behavior, approaptiate eotions to have, and approproate ways to address and express said emotions.