Nina Davuluri won the Miss America crown on Sunday, becoming the first Indian American to be so honored.
That’s should be a cause of celebration, but in America’s complex society, so much so that it’s beyond the comprehension of many, some respond by being racist, and in the process show that the USA’s very march toward diversity has made them mentally ill.
In other words, racism is a mental illness. Dr. Alvin F Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, recognized this in 2002 when, in The Western Journal Of Medicine, he wrote:
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.
Extreme racists’ violence should be considered in the context of behavior described by Allport in The Nature of Prejudice.2 Allport’s 5-point scale categorizes increasingly dangerous acts. It begins with verbal expression of antagonism, progresses to avoidance of members of disliked groups, then to active discrimination against them, to physical attack, and finally to extermination (lynchings, massacres, genocide). That fifth point on the scale, the acting out of extermination fantasies, is readily classifiable as delusional behavior.
The racist blasts Nina Davuluri was subjected to are classified as “verbal expression of antagonism,” and would seem to imply “avoidance of members of disliked groups” and “active discrimination against them.” We should not allow racists to “advance” to the next step: physical attack. That means stopping racism when stage one is reached. That means prescribing medicines that would actually reduce the chance of a racist event.
That’s what I said: “That means prescribing medicines that would actually reduce the chance of a racist event.” In other words, we need to finance research in the prevention of racist ideas via chemical means.
Stay tuned.