“Addiction Doesn’t Discriminate”: Colorblind Racism in American Rehab

Abstract

Drawing on ethnography and interviews with recovering men in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, this study explores how two dominant models of American rehab are racialized - coerced treatment theorizing addiction as criminal personality-and a more medicalized, voluntaristic model rooted in the brain disease paradigm. At the "carceral rehab" of "Arcadia House," staff assumed its majority court-mandated, poor men of color would arrive resistant to reforming their "lifestyle addictions," justifying treatment backed by (re)incarceration. In contrast, "Healing Bridges" offered its gentler, "medical-restorative rehab" to mostly white, middle-class patients who escaped incarceration despite substantial participation in drug-related crime. While both programs mobilized the colorblind logic that "addiction doesn't discriminate," local disparities routed recovering men into vastly different treatments, disproportionately criminalizing the addictions of the Black poor. In a racialized binary operating across the field, Arcadia's clients of color were viewed as sicker and more out of control than Bridges' white patients. While Arcadia's clients required coercive state management, Bridges' patients were understood as already possessing the capacity for self-management-reinforcing staff's mission to empower the non-addict within. Distinctions between coerced and voluntary treatment were naturalized and mapped onto recovering men, reproducing race at the most intimate levels of self-making.