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Is racism a mental disorder?
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Increasingly, hate crimes viewed as product of delusion
While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), is the bible for the psychiatric associations around the world, racism, bigotry and prejudice, do not appear as an official disorder within these pages, it does not necessarily exclude it from being one.
In the 1960s, during the civil rights era, many African-American psychiatrists tried to get extreme bigotry recognized as a mental disorder. The predominantly white American Psychological Association (APA) at the time concluded that the vast majority of Americans harbored some form of racism, therefore making it a “normative” event, not meriting being classified under any disorder.
However, within the last few years, there has been a shift away from that frame of thought. Many observers in the field, now believe that to continue believing in the idea of this normative, lends an undue legitimacy to extreme prejudice.
A well known behavioral psychologist by the name of Gordon Allport, laid the groundwork for this. He attested, in short, that there is a 5-point scale of increasingly dangerous attacks. What begins at point one as simple verbal antagonization, ends at point five with the acting out of brutal fantasies. (Allport, The Nature of Prejudice).
More recently, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, of Harvard University, suggests that extreme racism, may in fact be a part of delusional disorder. He suggests this subtype for the DSM:
Prejudice type: A delusion whose theme is that a group of individuals, who share a defining characteristic, in one's environment have a particular and unusual significance. These delusions are usually of a negative or pejorative nature, but also may be grandiose in content. When these delusions are extreme, the person may act out by attempting to harm, and even murder, members of the despised group(s).
Truthfully, I couldn’t agree more. With the things that we’ve seen as Americans, in this recent election; with the recent ATF raid on white supremacists who wanted to“assassinate Barack Obama and kill 88 black kids” at a local school—with the slurs and innuendos that have been taking place daily on the McCain and Palin stumps from within the audience—I think it’s long past due that we begin to recognize extreme racism as a mental disorder.
If the case of Ashely Todd taught us anything, the brutal racism that still infects this country is alive and well, and apparently fair game during an election season as well. If we can begin to recognize this things on a greater scale, we can at least hope to treat it before it begins. You can’t arrest someone for a hate crime until after it’s been committed.
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