Is racism a disease? – Daily JSTOR

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In 2013, a white NFL player was filmed using a racial slur. He quickly released a statement announcing that he would be consulting with a variety of professionals to help [him] better understand how [he] could have done something so offensive, and how [he] can start the healing process for everyone.

As sociologist James M. Thomas writes, this was just one of many examples of early 21st century celebrities calling their racist behaviors a mental health issue. Thomas argues that this view of racism took shape as part of the growing cultural power of medicine and psychology since World War II.

NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins took inspiration from Adorno to suggest that the hatred responsible for the murder was a virus, it’s in the Mississippian’s blood.

In 1944, in the midst of the Holocaust, the American Jewish Committee commissioned a series of studies examining the psychological sources of prejudice. The most famous of these was The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 by Theodor Adorno and three colleagues. The authors argued that anti-Semitism and other extreme bigotry were the product of nuclear ideas that founded negative stereotypes, such as the idea that Jews are complicit or that blacks are lazy, which underlie a personality authoritarian.

Thomas writes that civil rights activists have taken up this concept. Following the murder of Emmett Tills in 1955, NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins drew inspiration from Adorno to suggest that the hatred responsible for the murder was a virus, in the Mississippian’s blood.

In 1958, psychologist and civil rights activist Alfred J. Marrow called for public policy to address not only the effects of segregation on the mental health of its victims, but also the impact on the health of segregators . He and other mental health professionals promoted the idea of ​​racism as an aspect of a sick society. In 1969, a group of black psychiatrists petitioned the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to recognize racism as the number one mental health problem in this country and to create a list of extreme bigotry in the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual (DSM ). The APA agreed with their concern about the problem of racism but declined to identify extreme bigotry as a disorder. The problem, writes Thomas, was that for something to be considered a mental illness, it must deviate from normative behavior. Among white Americans, racism was just too normal to qualify.

Nevertheless, over the following decades, some scholars and clinicians continued to formulate diagnostic frameworks for identifying and treating racism. One suggested that racists suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, which causes them to seek praise from authority figures. Another conceptualized racism as addiction to a source of social power. In 2012, researchers at the University of Oxford even proposed a pharmacological cure for racism: a beta-blocker called propranolol that seemed to lower subjects’ scores on a test of implicit bias.

But Thomas argues that any effort to address racism in an individual necessarily targets only the symptoms of a much larger problem. Understanding racism, a system of subordination that benefits white people, requires historically grounded, culturally informed, and politically appropriate models, he writes.

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By: James M. Thomas

Contexts, Vol. 13, no. 4 (autumn 2014), p. 24 to 29

Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the American Sociological Association

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