Racism as Mental Illness

Posted on December 16, 2005 in Anxiety Hatred Mania

Shrinkette and Lindsay Beyerstein (who has since deleted her post for unknown reasons) have both explored the question of whether racism is a mental illness following a review of psychiatrists’ conjectures on the topic in the Washington Post.

I’m not out to debate either of these people: instead, I want to present prejudiced thought as I experience it from the inside of manic-depression. My particular and peculiar form of group-focused paranoia is anti-Semitism. When I feel it, I keep it off my blog because there’s always a still voice of sanity which I have developed with much effort to keep it at bay. Nevertheless, I do voice the opinions to my wife. And our conversations run something like this:

Joel: Goddamit! Those Jews are so fucking mean. I hate Jews. They drive me crazy.

Lynn: You don’t hate your friend Leah.

Joel: No, she’s all right. But the rest of them….

Lynn: What about your therapist, Lance?

Joel: Yeah, he’s a good guy, but….

And so we go down through a long list of Jews including the family we used to share Thanksgiving with, Elie Weisel, Simon Weisenthal, Adam Sandler, Golda Meir, Albert Einstein, Rabbi Hillel, Jesus, Jeremiah, the author of the Book of Job, my love of rabbinic tales, etc. etc. until I am left with a former boss, a loudmouth who lived across the hall from me during college, and Ariel Sharon.*

Joel: OK! OK! All those people are OK, but I tell you! Those Jews can be really mean!

Lynn: Sigh.

This delusion/paranoia responds very nicely to the cocktail of medications which I take for my bipolar disorder. When I come out of it, I am embarassed by how I talked. Mania and mixed mania are like that: the mouth dribbles and the mind breeds hitherto undescribed fungus from the drool. When you crash, you hide in your bed from the shame. When you stabilize you just shake your head in horrified wonder at the ways the neurotransmitter-starved crevices of the brain trip you up.

Alas, the racism expressed by millions around the world cannot be treated with a pill. We can rule out that it is caused by organic brain dysfunction. The ideas central to racism don’t come out of chemical-induced delusion but from a system of thought which is an exagerration of a basic human instinct: fear of the other.

If you think of it, the instinct has survival value. Let’s say you’re a black-haired Anglo-Saxon farmer squatting on your choice bit of Lancashire turf when you spy a strong, blonde man who speaks a different language coming down the road. You watch him because he’s different, make sure he’s not an enemy — particularly a Viking who’s acting as scout for a pillaging expedition.

When working properly, the instinct is meant to spur us to caution. Because of that, I think, Dr. Fink makes this erroneous utterance:

If you have a diagnostic category that fits 100 percent of people, it’s not a diagnostic category.

I don’t think that Fear of the Other Instinct necessarilly translates into racism. Racism is a systematized belief in the inferiority or dangerousness of others. I would call it Extreme Bias, not disimilar to what I exhibit when I am going around the wheel of bipolar’s Old Mill. The difference, I would say, that the racist ~refuses~ to let go of her/his core beliefs regardless of what exceptions can be pointed out to her or him. He will not allow you to alleviate his anxiety. Fixity of thought characterizes racism. It’s not like organic brain dysfunctions such as schizophrenia or bipolar: the racist does not want to change. The inverted thought pyramid upon whose broad apex he squats comforts him even though it is founded on a pinpoint of unstable and precarious logic.

I believe that we all suffer from Fear of the Other as part of our biological makeup. But that anxiety can be overcome by familiarity. The racist (as well as the homophobe, the jingoist, and other bigots ) strives to avoid familiarity at all costs. When his belief is challenged and shown to be wrong, he invents new rationales and new mythologies. He may go underground and avoid mentioning his views in uncertain company, but he does not give them up. He may fume when others around him undo the social and political structures he has come to rely upon and secretly work to undermine them. The racist does not believe that a just world can exist. By noncooperation, he will ensure that it doesn’t. The White Citizens’ Councils and the Christian Identity Churches depend on shared delusion and isolation. In this time, racism flourishes in cults or as lone individuals practising a morally bankrupt and indefensible philosophy.

The racist seeks to exagerrate the instinct. Like the sociopath, his favorite tactic is to deactivate the protests of others by accusing them of secretly feeling as he does. Like the paranoid, he is unduly suspicious of people around him, fearful that his daughter might sleep with a member of a different group, fearful that his son will become tolerant.

Every one of us may swing, from time to time, into exagerrated fear. But the best of us catch it and refuse to turn it into a guide for our living. If the racist is mentally ill, it is because he has chosen to be so. He magnifies his anxieties into ideologies and he won’t let go. No amount of medication will cause him to move so much as a little finger from clutching the beaten leather of his belief. These characteristics, I believe, (and I am no clinician) sound like a personality disorder similar to antisocial personality disorder (sociopathy), narcissistic personality disorder, and paranoid personality disorder

If so, the prognosis for successful treatment is poor. Sufferers of personality disorders seldom believe that there is anything wrong with them.

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*I know of bipolar Jews who express anti-Semitic sentiments when they are experiencing mood swings. Don’t understand it? Me either.