In light of what has been going on recently, I’m convinced that racism is some sort of psychosis used to justify White supremacy and has entrenched itself into the power structures of Western society.
I’m not dismissing racism or trying to take away responsibility or agency from the perpetrators, I’m just saying from my observation from what happened in circumstances such as with George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery the more it got me thinking how racism might be symptomatic of a much larger underlying psychological condition prevalent in White society and the power structures are reinforcing that psychological condition.
So if this is the case, how does White society overcome this psychosis?
Our brains haven’t really progressed too much from Cavemen. And our social sense is very tribal. It’s ingrained but we have to recognize it and strive to be better.
I don’t think it is. I think tribalism is built into our DNA due to evolution. We are social animals and we evolved to be dependent on those within our tribe and to view other tribes as either irrelevant or hostile. The lines used to demarcate tribes tend to be religious, racial, cultural, ideological, ethnic, geographic, etc.
I think racism is sadly a natural part of our DNA, and it happens the entire world over. If you think white people in the US are the only ones who are racist, then spend some time in the middle east or east asia and see what even more ingrained racism looks like.
I’m not sure what the treatment for racism is. I think rebuilding tribal lines along other line other than racial, but that isn’t always easy. Supposedly sports and military are good at this since your social identity is based on lines other than race. How do you weaken people’s identification with their race as part of their social identity, or find some other feature for them to identify with as their social identity and tribe?
And supposedly race relations are better in places like Canada, UK & France. I’ve heard of some black people saying visiting there is like taking a vacation from racism. But I don’t know how we could transition to those systems.
I think it is for some racists, though not for all. I’ll give two extreme examples, both white people in the United States.
Racist A. Grew up in the Deep South in a small town of predominantly white people, most of who were / are also racist. Currently in their 70s. Their parents taught them that black people were somehow inferior, and so did most of the teachers at school and the pastor at church. This person now believes that black people are less intelligent than white people. They are more likely to prefer someone with a white sounding name than a black sounding name if they are making a hiring decision. None the less they have sympathy for back people as fellow humans and believe that what happened to George Floyd is wrong.
Racist B. Grew up in San Francisco and is currently in their early 20s. Parents taught them that all people are equal and that racism is wrong. Most of there white peers were also raised by parents with the same beliefs. None the less, for whatever reason, they sought out white supremacist literature online and ended up joining the Aryan nation. They spend some of their free time at BLM protests inciting violence. They believe that white people who aren’t racist are traitors to their race. They believe that the officer who killed George Floyd did nothing wrong.
Racist A is psychologically normal, while Eacist B isn’t.
I think it is for some racists, though not for all. I’ll give two extreme examples, both white people in the United States.
Racist A. Grew up in the Deep South in a small town of predominantly white people, most of who were / are also racist. Currently in their 70s. Their parents taught them that black people were somehow inferior, and so did most of the teachers at school and the pastor at church. This person now believes that black people are less intelligent than white people. They are more likely to prefer someone with a white sounding name than a black sounding name if they are making a hiring decision. None the less they have sympathy for back people as fellow humans and believe that what happened to George Floyd is wrong.
Racist B. Grew up in San Francisco and is currently in their early 20s. Parents taught them that all people are equal and that racism is wrong. Most of there white peers were also raised by parents with the same beliefs. None the less, for whatever reason, they sought out white supremacist literature online and ended up joining the Aryan nation. They spend some of their free time at BLM protests inciting violence. They believe that white people who aren’t racist are traitors to their race. They believe that the officer who killed George Floyd did nothing wrong.
Racist A is psychologically normal, while Eacist B isn’t.
I don’t see how that follows at all. Has Racist B been evaluated by a psychologist?
Just because one was raised by one’s racists to identify as “not a racist” and then goes on to become a very obvious racist anyway doesn’t mean they’re suffering from a psychological disorder. I mean sure, they could be in the same way that schizotypal personality disorder tends to correlate with conspiratorial thinking, but one does not necessarily lead to the other (nor does one require the other as a prerequisite), even if it appears contrary to one’s upbringing.
What I’m getting at is if someone is raised in a racist culture, it’s easy to be a psychologically normal racist. A prominent example is the late Robert Byrd, longtime senator from West Virginia. He was a leader in the KKK in his youth but with age realized his views were wrong. At the time of his death he was hailed by the NAACP as a champion for the civil rights of African-Americans.
On the other hand there are people like the Charlottesville killer who was not raised in a racist culture but became one as a result of his psychiatric issues. I’m not saying that everyone with mental disorders will become racist. What I am saying is that if someone is raised in an environment that isn’t racist and then becomes racist and seeks out white supremacist literature and groups is likely to have significant psych issues.
Hmmm. Although I don’t think the OP was in any way trying to seek excuses for racism, ISTM that even asking the question kind of reflects the influence of systemic racism on the ways that we “medicalize” or “biologize” different types of behavior.
For instance, when poor urban black people get addicted to crack cocaine, they’re typically portrayed as irresponsible criminals who are wantonly destroying their lives and communities. When poor urban white people get addicted to opioids, they’re typically portrayed as tragic victims of an ongoing social crisis that’s denying them economic opportunities and healthy lives and so forth.
When we talk about, say, black violence, we’re bombarded with speculations about how blacks for whatever reasons are just “naturally” more “prone” to violence, along with a bunch of evo-psych spitballing about possible biological causes. When we talk about white racism, all of a sudden the causal issues are broadened into universality: racism is just “natural” “tribalism” and “a natural part of our DNA”, and we fall over ourselves to point out that not only white people espouse it. (Of course, it’s not only black people who espouse violence either, but somehow conversations about black violence never just peter out with similarly universalist reminders that violence is a natural ingrained human trait “the entire world over”.) Or else we try to medicalize racism as a “psychological disorder” that afflicts us involuntarily, rather than our deliberately choosing to endorse it.
Me, I tend to think that white people in the US are comparatively more racist than many other people because our society has historically and systematically trained racism into us, in order to hold onto the many significant advantages that a systematically racist society provides for white people. The height of Jim Crow racial discrimination was barely a century ago, and it was a system carefully constructed in order to encourage non-wealthy white people to identify their interests with those of wealthy white people rather than with those of non-wealthy black people, who were their natural socioeconomic allies.
Over the past seventy years a lot of the visible structure of Jim Crow has been dismantled, but a lot of the attitudes and assumptions that fostered it are nowhere close to dying out. There are plenty of Americans still alive who grew up considering it normal for black people and white people to use different bathrooms and attend different schools, for instance. If you want an explanation of why the US is still in many ways so much more overtly racist than some other majority-white countries, such as the “Canada, UK and France” invoked by Wesley Clark, I don’t think you need to look any further than our uniquely pernicious experience with slavery and then with the white-supremacist backlash against abolition and Reconstruction.
I think a certain degree of xenophobia may come to us naturally. (I think it plays a prominent role in gender variation for example). What is normative in our current society is that we grow up knowing about different races, and knowing about racism, and having access to the personal narratives of minority people, peoples of differing ethnic and racial backgrounds and cultures, including what it’s like to be on the receiving end of racism and ethnocentric hostility.
That makes strong racism a choice for most of the people who embrace it. They had options and they had alternative cognitive perspectives available to them.
The more diluted weaker racism, where people’s conscious belief is that all types of people are equal and that hateful racist antagonism is wrong and a social problem, but where they don’t examine their own participation in institutions and practices that may perpetuate embedded unfairnesses, is still fairly normative. People’s awareness of critiques of that, and of their options for exploring what it means, are probably a lot more attenuated.
Is that not a kind of question begging, though, in that it presumes that the broader culture itself, or at least very easily accessed portions of it, is not racist?
Because I get that certain killers have been shown to have mental health issues or suffer from personality disorders, but all you’re really showing is correlation. And then there’s the asshole who shot up a synagogue in San Diego last year who seemed to be generally stable, apart from the whole “being a white supremacist” and “shooting up a synagogue” thing.
To claim that racism is a psychological disorder, particularly when the consensus among actual mental health experts is that it isn’t, is kind of troubling for a number of reasons, not least of which as outlined by Kimstu. Also, it allows racists who aren’t (like many other racists) suffering from legitimate psychological issues to respond with “I’m not a racist because my therapist says I’m fine,” while further “othering” people with actual mental health issues. It somehow manages to take a problem that is prevalent among the dominant/most privileged class, and shift it onto an already marginalized group (people with mental illness). Kind of like anti-bullying campaigns in which the victims of bullying are cast as “school-shooters to be who we must reach out to before they kill us.” Because god forbid anti-bullying campaigns be leveraged against bullies themselves. No, it’s got to further this idea that the victims of bullying are the real dangers to society and to other children.
So, to sum up, racism is not only not a psychological disorder, but a psychological disorder is not even necessary to cause racism, even if one is brought up in a household that ostensibly preaches tolerance, particularly as there seems to be good evidence that the broader culture condones racism, and one can easily seek out, even be led into, groups of racists through social networks.
Given that “race” is a social construct which we could conceivably abandon, I would bet no.
But could we find evidence that humans (and indeed other great ape species) have a tendency to be fiercely territorial and possess characteristics like kin recognition (and will even go so far as to kill off the dependent children of recently expelled or deceased rival males—again, this isn’t even just a human thing, but a great ape thing) that could easily translate to xenophobia and tribalism?
I’m pretty sure the answer to that is yes (and I limit my degree of certainty only because I don’t feel like digging up the cites right now).
Which, by the way, would make racism less likely, not more likely, to require some kind of psychological disorder to explain. Because if it’s found not just across cultures and times, but can be shown to have some analogue in other closely related species, that points to a level of… “normalcy” not deviance. Humans evolved in close-knit groups of hunter-gatherers. Humans evolved with a limited range. Forget about widely varying skin colors within that range. Just encountering another adjacent, almost identical-looking tribe would be cause to flip one’s shit not all that long ago on an evolutionary time scale.
But let’s be clear: just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s right. To claim as much would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy. What it does do is point to a sort of “natural” origin for what may be expressed today as a tendency towards racism it’s at doesn’t require any kind of deviant mental state or psychological condition to explain.