A Mental Health Crisis Ignored for Far Too Long: Racism
The classification of racism as a mental health crisis in the United States needs serious and rigorous consideration. The country should, by now, be unwilling to bear the toll legacy race/ethnicity based norms and attitudes, institutional racism, and illegal/immoral racist actions places on society. To underscore the point, 2018 saw the largest number of hate crimes reported in the United States in 16 years, 7120, according to the FBI with sixty percent of the crimes motivated by race, ethnicity, or ancestry bias. Also in 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported a 30% increase in hate groups, and an upswing in racist attitudes and behaviors.
From this perspective, to see the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man shot while jogging through a rural South Georgia community, as symptomatic of a larger human condition plaguing the United States should not take much effort. Obvious to most, the mentality of the three white men who stalked him for no reason other than they thought he should not have been there. And it was their duty to find out why he was there, as they, in their minds, had the right to accuse him of something he did not do. They shot him and went home. And there they stayed, perhaps even comfortable in their rectitude, because a black man running on a street where a white man lives is suspicious deserving what he gets.
Taken separately, tragedies like these can be viewed as people acting violently, perhaps breaking the law, something for the system to decide. However, when considered in the aggregate, repeatedly the country is faced with white people acting violently, killing unarmed black people, the underlying causes should be examined. Because, it is acknowledged fact, unless self-protection is truly at the root, violence against self, others or someone’s property are symptoms of mental health issues. Potentially serious emotional issues.
It is historical consistency and present day attitudes and behaviors that make violence towards Black, native and others a mental health issue different from the random acts of violence that gives the U.S. one of the highest per capita murder rates, 4.6 per 100,000, in the world as compared to other developed countries, and even many underdeveloped nations. Yet the mental health of a nation where there are more firearms in the hands of private citizens than there are citizens is seldom castigated when the response to people of color, particularly men, are more extreme than victims’ behaviors warrant.
Should we not determine whether underlying mental health issues are considerations in cases where the commonalities are blatantly obvious? Should we not see that race based legacy systems steeped in U.S. culture for over five hundred years has had, and do have, an impact on the mental health of individuals within U.S. society? Like PTSD, post-traumatic stress syndrome, a culture which at its core pronounces white men as protectors, innocent until proven guilty and others as perpetrators, guilty until proven innocent, maybe, impacts everyone.
As with many other mental health conditions racial bias, racism, is enabled, knowingly and not by behaviors and attitudes contrary to good health, individual and societal. Demonizing others based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender is rooted in U.S. culture. How many of us have watched native annihilation entertainment? Settlers protecting their land from marauding bands of natives, cheering the cowboys on to victory. Or praised southern chain gangs, the system of forced labor that built many roads, bridges, and buildings. Not connecting that free labor system to the one that continues to bring Black and Brown people to the nation’s prisons in disproportionate numbers. Or applauded the virile masculinity of white men taking and taming of Spanish speaking, native and black women. Seeing their rape as different from any other’s.
So when the footage emerged of a gun on the floor in Atatiana Jefferson’s house, naturally we wonder was she the cause of the police officer fatally shooting her through her own bedroom window. And that young Trayvon Martin, because he was a pot head, must have been the reason his murderer disobeyed the police who told him to cease pursuing the young man. Framing victims as being at fault, being less than worthy, less than human, is a legacy phenomenon, making Officer Michael Slager actually think dropping his taser beside Walter Scott’s lifeless body would cause people to believe the man he had just shot in the back had wrestled the weapon away from him and ran.
This is the culturally enabled mental state where the treatment of people of color by the dominant culture enables: privilege and flight within one group; subservience and fight in another; and complicity by those who benefit from a society where race and skin color make a difference. Racial bias is not only a defense it’s a way of life, which makes questioning the status quo a punishable offense and questioners outliers.
Well-crafted stories find sympathetic ears already softened by decades of hate speech, propaganda and less than human characterizations of others. This narrative defines the state of consciousness indoctrinating generations in the U.S. for hundreds of years. From the thousands of natives kidnapped from their homes spirited away to so-called Normal schools for indoctrination to the thousands of Japanese Americans who were given hours to gather their belongings forced to leave homes and land then transported to internment camps; xenophobia, paranoia and prejudice have known few boundaries in the U.S. And apparently still do not.
It seems though that the U.S., like with gun violence, has simply decided to live with the institutions that make treating people differently because of their skin color so ingrained in U.S. society. From Equal Employment Opportunity Commission offices to Fair Housing Acts administrations to thousands of fair standards groups, diversity administrators, equity lawyers, commissions, and agencies the cost of inequity, bias, discrimination and hate crimes is staggering. Billions spent propping up systems that give majority rule and privilege to most whites, denying equity to most others.
Heretofore, the mental health community has resisted Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Poussaint’s 1969 petition to have racism included in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Pressing again in 2015 by stating, “It’s time for mental health professionals to examine their resistance to accepting extreme racism as a symptom of serious mental illness.” Dr. Poussaint’s call to action still goes unheeded.
Few can argue however linkages between a five-hundred-year history of racism and the current psychological state of the nation’s inhabitants regarding racial differences exist. However, even if a mental health disease classification is illusive perhaps an epidemiological foundation can be established classifying the current racist culture in the U.S. as a mental health condition affecting millions is possible. Perhaps mental health professionals, funding agencies and governmental priorities can come together to determine both classification and efficacy for treating individuals, communities and society at large impacted to the point of irrational states of mind and behaviors by ethnic biases, race based social conditioning, victimization, and racially motivated behaviors. A classification of racism as a mental health problem reaching epidemic proportions in the U.S. allows for both victims and victimizers to get needed services, treatment, and care, hopefully before the epidemic gets worse.
Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
Source: Security Management, Violent Hate Crimes Reach 16-Year High in United States by Claire Meyer, Feb. 1, 2020
Source: The Marshall Project Nonprofit Journalism about Criminal Justice)
Source: New York Times, Jan 7, 2004
Source: The Washington Post, “How racism came to be called a mental illness — and why that’s a problem” by W. Carson Byrd and James M. Thomas, June 7, 2016
