Is Racism a Mental Illness?

SBPDL travels a lot. Having the opportunity to visit virtually every state in the union grants a unique perspective to the tastes and peculiarities of Black people in geographically diverse areas.

Recently while waiting for a connection in the surprisingly clean Detroit Metro Airport, an advertisement was played on the bothersome giant flat screens in the terminal that have the menacing quality of Orwell's dystopia.

That advertisement in question featured CNN's Jane-Velez Mitchell defiantly claiming "racism is a mental illness." Here is the transcripts from the show in which that quip has its origins:

But also from a psychological perspective, realize that the person exhibiting the racism is the person with the problem. The person exhibiting the racism is the person who has low self-esteem because otherwise, there would be no reason for them to try to elevate themselves in this manner over someone else. And that essentially, in my humble opinion, racism is a form of mental illness, and we have got to start really treating it as a sickness.

An avid reader of zombie literature, the writer behind SBPDL looked around and realized that we already live in a world where the zombie apocalypse has occurred. Watching individuals shift aimlessly through the airport with little drive or motivation and displaying an incurable level of fecklessness is one form of proof, but the slavish mentality that people watch television in airports and unwittingly nod their heads at such statements is further justification of the existence of the apocalypse we all now live through.

If 'racism is a mental illness' why did Newsweek devote an entire article to bemoaning the recent scientific findings that babies notice racial differences?:

In our new book, NurtureShock, we argue that many modern strategies for nurturing children are backfiring—because key twists in the science have been overlooked. Small corrections in our thinking today could alter the character of society long term, one future citizen at a time. The way white families introduce the concept of race to their children is a prime example.

For decades, it was assumed that children see race only when society points it out to them. However, child-development researchers have increasingly begun to question that presumption. They argue that children see racial differences as much as they see the difference between pink and blue—but we tell kids that "pink" means for girls and "blue" is for boys. "White" and "black" are mysteries we leave them to figure out on their own...

How do researchers test a 6-month-old? They show babies photographs of faces. Katz found that babies will stare significantly longer at photographs of faces that are a different race from their parents, indicating they find the face out of the ordinary. Race itself has no ethnic meaning per se—but children's brains are noticing skin-color differences and trying to understand their meaning.

When the kids turned 3, Katz showed them photographs of other children and asked them to choose whom they'd like to have as friends. Of the white children, 86 percent picked children of their own race. When the kids were 5 and 6, Katz gave these children a small deck of cards, with drawings of people on them. Katz told the children to sort the cards into two piles any way they wanted. Only 16 percent of the kids used gender to split the piles. But 68 percent of the kids used race to split the cards, without any prompting. In reporting her findings, Katz concluded: "I think it is fair to say that at no point in the study did the children exhibit the Rousseau type of color-blindness that many adults expect."

As has already been established here at SBPDL, only white people can be racist. Never mind the near monolithic support Black people gave Mein Obama in 2008's Presidential Election, nor the near perfect approval rating that Black people give Zod Obama today (as every other definable group bails on him, even Disingenuous White Liberals), only white people have the innate capacity to be racist.

This is a healthy reaction to the zombie apocalypse that threatens to overwhelm us all, the banding together of a distinct group to protect group interests. White people, when faced with the zombie apocalypse around them have decided to endorse Ayn Rand as their antidote and embrace the cult of the individual.

There are some who make the claim that race is a societal construct and that the pernicious manner in creating division within the "we are all one" world by stating race is a biological fact is not only erroneous, but worse - evil.

Regardless of which you take, one truth must be stated: the inhabitants of modern-day Detroit are a socially-destructive people. Worse, cities don't spring forth like Athena from the head of Zeus. They are designed and inhabited by people, built and maintained by individuals working together for the good of the collective - not just the economic benefit of the individual.

Reason magazine recently ran a cover story on how to save America's dying cities by dispensing libertarian advice on improving the quality of life in Cleveland:

Since its population hit a high point in 1950, Cleveland has lost more than half of its residents and essentially all of its economic and cultural capital. The Rapture happened here, but instead of going to the bosom of God in heaven, the elect ended up in Houston, Charlotte, Los Angeles, New York, and, most galling of all because of its proximity and broad-shouldered similarity, Chicago. There was a time, at the turn of the 20th century, when Cleveland and Chicago were real rivals, but that competition long ago devolved into a sort of lopsided Clippers vs. Lakers fiasco in which the clear winner need not even acknowledge that a competition ever existed.

As Chicago was becoming the hog butcher for the world and tool maker and stacker of wheat, Cleveland peaked as the seventh-largest city in America, with nearly 1 million residents, before beginning a long, slow, steady decline underscored by race riots, the Cuyahoga River bursting into flames, and a 1978 default on its municipal bonds. This year Cleveland earned the dubious honor of being named “the most miserable city” in the U.S. by Forbes.

Strange that the decline of Cleveland eerily parallels the declining percentage of the white population and the dramatic rise of the Black population.

An interesting piece from The New York Times published in 1996 points to the disturbing trend of white flight and the Black people who realize that this migration of white folks is merely a precursor to financial and societal destabilization:

In 1980, Matteson was 84 percent white. Ten years later, the figure was 53 percent. Today, this village of about 11,000 residents, settled by German immigrants, is 47 percent white and 48 percent black.

Now, the interracial village board is aggressively trying to woo whites to town with a carefully aimed "affirmative marketing" campaign. Some here say the plan is a necessary step toward maintaining property values and diversity as the hopes of "I Have A Dream" are fading across the country. Brotherhood, they say, sometimes needs a push.

As we learned when discussing Whitopia's, those white people who dare decide to congregate in the same geographic area do so because of the school's, never admitting that the reason the school's are so good is due to the obviously distressing homogeneity of the students.

Harvard educator Robert Putnam showed in his meticulous studies that diversity leads to a chronic breakdown in trust and civility within a town:

IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

Forbes ran a story in 2007 about the top cities for volunteering, where Putnam's ideas quoted above brought to light a harsh reality that helps elaborate on the picture presented in the New Orleans vs. Nashville debate: cities with a lot of Black people seem to be places of extreme mistrust:

So does some heightened sense of civic good grow deep in the heartland? Maybe. But there are pragmatic reasons as well. According to the study, four major factors tend to encourage high volunteer rates: attachment of a community (such as high levels of home ownership), low commute times to and from work, high education levels among the population and the presence of nonprofit organizations in a community.

"These factors tend to build social capital and to directly or indirectly encourage volunteering," says the report "Volunteering in America: 2007 City Trends and Rankings."

The coming collapse of Birmingham, Alabama and the complete collapse of Clayton County in Georgia aren't attributable to the factors delineated by Reason magazine when they lament the passing of Cleveland. No, the direct cause of each of these places is simply the tragic loss of the white populations that built and sustained them until the societal indicators of impending chaos as described by Putnam where entered into the equation.

Reason is wrong about Cleveland and that city's jaw-dropping fall, but as devout followers of Ayn Rand they believe that collectivism is racism. They too are part of the zombie apocalypse, but they cling to hopes of an undefinable rebirth of individualism that will to thwart what ails society.

As Rand Paul has shown, this will not come. Like some tin-foil hat wearing nut, these people will retreat to their cabins in the wilderness and hope the storm of collective insanity rushes past them, never comprehending that that storm passed long ago.

The zombie apocalypse has happened and for those who can see this once believed to be a prospect of horror and science fiction, is but an eventuality that comes as no surprise.

Major cities throughout the United States are designated no-go areas and off limits for those who long ago fled the metropolises that their ancestors once lived in without fear. Save for the few sporting events that families who participated in the great Dunkirk of white flight might attend, major cities in America continue to languish in squalor and criminality.

Racism is not to blame. The current inhabitants of these major cities are to blame. However, since we live in a world where the zombie apocalypse occurred bloodlessly, racism will be designated a mental illness soon.

It is those who can see that pose the only threat to the mind-numbing falsity of egalitarianism, which blinds Libertarian and Disingenuous White Liberal, Crusading White Pedagogue and proponents of Black Run America alike.

It is not human flesh that the zombies lust for, but the continuation of egalitarianism at any cost that sustains them. Even if it means the insolvency of Cleveland and Birmingham in the process.

A Black female undergraduate journalist from Florida A&M sums up the strong points of the mental illness of racism by writing:

Racism is an issue that many people try to avoid, although it is something that still exists today. Can racism be tied to something deeper than a difference in skin tone, perhaps, a mental illness?

The issue was first raised 40 years ago by a group of black psychiatrists who asked the American Psychiatric Association to classify forms of extreme bigotry and prejudice as a mental disorder.

The APA rejected their request on the grounds that racism is a “cultural and social problem and cannot be attributed to any disorder.”

The APA also said that labeling racism as a mental illness will not do anything to rid society of the problem and doing so will carry too many political implications.This has remained the general consensus.

Recently, some psychiatrists argue that the notion deserves a second look. “To continue perceiving extreme racism as normative and not pathologic is to lend it legitimacy. Clearly, anyone who scapegoats a whole group of people and seeks to eliminate them to resolve his or her internal conflicts meets criteria for a delusional disorder, a major psychiatric illness,” said Alvin F. Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University.

Not recognizing racism as a mental illness seems to legitimize it. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, a mental disorder is defined as a behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom.

Black's who engage in monolithic support of Mein Obama are excused from the mental illness of racism. Only white people can be racist, thus only white people can be mentally ill.

The zombies won. Watching CNN's advertisement featuring Mitchell's declaration of retardation for those who profess racism was dumbfounding. The cable channel who brought us 'Black in America' has all but declared war on white people without realizing that the Newsweek cover story about the proclivities of babies to respond positively to members of their own race speaks to the biological reality of race in ways no boring study on IQ and racial differences in LSAT or SAT studies could.

Racism isn't a mental illness. The rejection of what guides the various races to self-segregate is unhealthy and the true mental illness, but when you factor in that the world has undergone the zombie apocalypse already then it all makes sense.

White people recoil in fear at the mere mention of the word racist. It is this cowardice that is unhealthy.

Regardless, Cleveland will continue to lose residents and no amount of individualism and Libertarian magic from Reason can change that fact.

Stuff Black People Don't Like can only laugh at the question of racism being a mental illness, as this illness - as defined by CNN - is only found among white people.

Boarding the airplane to leave Detroit and upon taking off, the writer behind SBPDL could look out the window and view the crumbling ruins of that city from an ascending point of view. Acres upon acres stretched out in ominous sadness, a massive monument to the tragedy of racism being viewed as a mental illness.

Sipping on a Coke and eating poorly salted peanuts, it became crystal clear that we live in a world governed with the same rigged and enforced tyranny as the one depicted in the remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.