Are racists and other haters mentally disordered?
No seriously, this matters. It matters because this perception is broadly accepted colloquially whether it is true or not. The notion that mass-shooters and doers of violence can be assumed to be mentally ill is a common feature on DU.
The wide social acceptance of this belief facilitates moving the blame of hate crimes/hate violence, away from institutions and structures of the socio-economic environment that many researchers argue quietly and insidiously perpetuate hatefullness from generation to generation. It allows thinking to shift from nebulous invisible cultural forces to pointed, if unoffical and unprofessional, determinations of sickness of individuals which then stand as evidence against persons with mental illness as a class.
The following article "doesn't actually argue against this perception... and it's motivated by a new book:
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WaPost: How racism came to be called a mental illness https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/06/07/how-racism-came-to-be-called-a-mental-illness-and-why-thats-a-problem/
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The mental health frame gained momentum in the 1930s, when social scientists sought to explain the extreme prejudice and bigotry manifest in Nazism and fascism. Some social scientists argued that these sentiments stemmed from what the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich called — in a telling phrase — a “deathly sick society.”
Others focused less on society and more on the individual. In 1950, “The Authoritarian Personality” gained widespread attention among academic and lay audiences alike for claiming racism and authoritarianism — like that in Nazi Germany — were not only psychological but rooted in childhood experiences, particularly the presence of a strong and overbearing father.
The book was widely criticized but was nevertheless influential. For example, in a speech before the annual conference of the National Urban League in 1958, psychologist Alfred J. Marrow argued that the psychological causes and consequences of extreme hatred were evident simply by scanning the daily newspapers. Marrow said “the problem is primarily psychological in nature, [and] we must turn for guidance and help to the behavioral scientists.”
The mental health frame was applied not only to racists themselves but to their victims. By the middle of the 20th century, many scholars believed that the country’s long history of racism created an enduring psychopathological legacy.For example, in historian Stanley Elkins’s highly influential 1959 book, “Slavery: A problem in American institutional and intellectual life,” he argued that totalitarian environments like plantations and concentration camps inflicted child-like behaviors and retrogression on their victims. Without massive reformation, he further argued, these patterns would persist over generations. A similar argument can be found in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous claim that the black family represented a “tangle of pathology.”
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note that this excerpt is limited by rules preventing copyright infringement, there is rather more in the article.
= new reply since forum marked as read
