Is racism a mental illness?

Srishti Shankar, INN/Delhi, @shankar_srishti

We all are aware of what exactly the term “racism” talks about. Racism can be defined as discrimination against a group of people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalised.

If we were given a task to rediscover the origin of ‘racism’, we can clearly state the examples of the era of the 1500s and 1600s. The African slave trade which is known to be one of the essential parts of ‘dawn of capitalism’, provides us with various instances and ordeals of coloured people who were made to feel inferior not only because of the colour of their skin but also for practising prominent ethnic-rituals. Racism began to be categorised as a part of human nature and by and by it became a challenge, a dilemma,  a part of our community-mindset and now we can only fathom to take a look on- “how it can be linked and closely articulated as a type of ‘mental disorder’.”

“If you judge other people by the colour of their skin, by the amount of a chemical in their skin, you have a mental problem. You are not dealing well with reality”, as rightly stated by Jane Elliot in the year 1962 in Oprah Winfrey show, the grainy clip has recently gained a lot of importance and its growing popularity cannot be left unnoticed. 

Where the whole world is dealing with mental adversities, the discrepancy which has recently turned heads of millions of people due to the death of George Floyd has to be given equal importance too. As a community, we need to understand how important it has become for us to take care of our mental condition and how equally important it has become for us to raise our voice against such communal atrocities which has never failed to create a great dispute amongst people across the globe.

The “black lives matter” campaign has drawn the attention of all the people as well as all the leaders across countries. The whole dilemma to correlate racism and juxtapose it with mental-illness is decades old. 

“ In 1969, a group of prominent Black psychiatrists petitioned the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to add extreme bigotry to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the handbook of mental disorders, now in its 5th edition. Their petition still stands rejected.”

The APA’s reason for rejection reveals something about the underlying desire for racism to be designated as a sickness. For something to be considered a mental illness, it must deviate from typical thinking or behaviour, and cause disruption and distress to a person’s life. The APA said that racism was, in contrast, so widespread that it was a cultural issue, not psychopathology. Racism is too common, in other words, to be an illness.

By not calling racism a mental illness, does that mean we accept these acts of racism as normal human behaviour? If racism is not a mental illness, why is it so hard to get extremely racist people to change their minds? Doesn’t their refusal mean that their beliefs are not opinions, but mere delusions? Delusions based on the efficacy of decades-old conundrum where African slaves were mistreated and made to feel inferior about the amount of melanin present in their skin.

We should have our own stance and views about all such issues which are taking place around us lately. It has become a need of the hour for us to deeply understand the correlation between mental health and various social-communal issues which still prevails in our society. If we don’t raise our voice and form an opinion about the current prevailing scenarios then who else will?

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