大象传媒

A few weeks ago, we convened and moderated a 鈥渏ustice and equity鈥� reading group for students, staff, and faculty at a local college. Our inaugural meeting centered on an essay in which the author calls attention to the shortcomings of organizing racial justice interventions in higher education around the sanitized and depoliticized language of 鈥渄iversity.鈥�

While nearly every participant agreed that programs and initiatives captured under the banner of 鈥渄iversity鈥� would fail to remediate historical and contemporary racial wrongs, we quickly noticed something else: A number of white discussants began describing racism as a 鈥渄isease,鈥� as a 鈥渕ental illness,鈥� and as a form of 鈥渄eviant behavior.鈥� In a private conversation after the gathering, one staff member approached us with the suggestion that we should consider 鈥渓obotomizing the racists that hold our country back.鈥�

The presumption that one can eliminate racism by snuffing out a few 鈥渂ad apples鈥� misses the mark.

The subtext was palpable: Racism is little more than a behavior-based psychopathology that discloses itself in discrete manifestations of bigotry, prejudice, and misunderstanding. According to such a construction, racism can only be treated with medical intervention. Racial inequity, therefore, is simply the sum of the actions of individual bigots and racial justice can be achieved by 鈥渃uring鈥� those individuals.

The presumption that one can eliminate racism by snuffing out a few 鈥渂ad apples鈥� misses the mark. In fact, such a paradigm misdiagnoses the systemic and ideological production of race itself, which is squarely centered in white supremacy.

The 鈥渞acism as disease鈥� paradigm only seems to make sense if one were also to believe that racism is: 1) a matter of (mis)recognition and (mis)perception meted out in an apolitical and behaviorist colorblind present; 2) an unfortunate holdover from slavery, a past mistake that has yet to be rectified; and 3) an anomaly, a radical deviation from the telos of dominant political institutions and practices.

Such a , however, is not an appendage of 19th century scientific racism, but rather 20th century liberal social science. In  (1944), Swedish Nobel laureate economist Gunnar Myrdal argued that 鈥淸racism] is a terrible and inexplicable anomaly stuck in the middle of our liberal democratic ethos.鈥� His popular study鈥攆unded by the Carnegie Foundation鈥攑rovides a forceful, if incomplete, framework for explaining the persistence of racial injustice in the United States. Myrdal鈥檚 book quickly became an authoritative text for defenders of racial integration in the postwar period, and his work gained popularity in the U.S. imagination after it was cited in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Structural white supremacy, in other words, became conflated with individual bigotry.

Together, Myrdal鈥檚 study and the Brown decision helped to shift race discourse away from systemic critiques of white supremacy emblematized by DuBois鈥檚  (1903) to diagnoses based on 鈥減sychological knowledge鈥� and personal attitudes. Addressing and eliminating quantifiable racial inequities gave way to treating individual racists (i.e. the few 鈥渂ad apples鈥�) in an otherwise racially just country. Structural white supremacy, in other words, became conflated with individual bigotry.

Consider the depiction above. From 1900 to the mid-century, the terms 鈥渨hite supremacy鈥� and 鈥渞acism鈥� were both used at a similar rate in popular and scholarly usage. Beginning in the late 1950s, however, 鈥渞acism鈥� began to surpass 鈥渨hite supremacy鈥� as the preeminent term for marking, diagnosing, and ameliorating various forms of racial injustice. The deficiency of this term rests in its ability to make invisible both its locus and its origin: whiteness. Avoiding the term 鈥渨hite鈥� overlooks the policies, practices, and hierarchies of domination and exclusion that has shaped U.S. and global history.

Myrdal鈥檚 study continues to set the parameters of mainstream race discourse in the United States. His anomaly thesis casts racism in the vernacular of deviance and abnormality, providing the discursive basis for thinking about racism as illness or disease.

White supremacy, however, is unexplainable by the anomaly thesis. In  (1984), scholar  rightly argues that 鈥渞acism is not simply an excrescence on a fundamentally healthy liberal democratic body 鈥� Liberal democracy and racism in the U.S. are historically, even inherently, reinforcing; American society as we know it exists only because of its foundation in racially based slavery, and it thrives only because racial discrimination continues. The apparent anomaly is an actual symbiosis.鈥� White supremacy is not an unfortunate, anomalous stain on an otherwise virginal tapestry of democracy, but rather, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, it鈥檚 terribly, terrifyingly normal.

Because racism is ubiquitous, it could not constitute a mental illness.

In fact, the  has for decades admitted that racial injustice is too normal to be considered a mental illness or a disease. In 1969, a group of black psychiatrists urged the organization to acknowledge that racism is the 鈥渕ajor mental health problem of this country鈥� and to include extreme bigotry as a recognized mental illness in the . Though the APA endorsed the 鈥済eneral spirit of reform and redress of racial inequities in American psychiatry,鈥� it rejected the psychiatrists鈥� desire to classify extreme bigotry as a mental illness. In order for racism to be considered a mental illness, the APA declared, racism must deviate from normative behavior. Because racism is ubiquitous, it could not constitute a mental illness. The APA used this rationale to keep racism out of the DSM in 1980, 1987, 1994, and 2013.

The ideology of race itself leads back to whiteness and white supremacy. U.S. immigration and naturalization legislation, race-based marriage statutes, inheritance law, redlining, and the segregation of public facilities are all examples of how whiteness informs policy and practice. They draw, secure, police, and legitimize the parameters of whiteness and non-whiteness.

So-called anti-miscegenation statutes reinforce this argument. From a strictly etymological perspective, 鈥渁nti-miscegenation鈥� most closely refers to a proscription against 鈥渞ace-mixing鈥� in marriage or conjugal entanglements. The term, however, does not accurately depict the ideological underpinnings of the law. Most anti-miscegenation laws, in fact, did not prohibit marriage or sexual relations between two non-white people. What architects of anti-miscegenation laws feared most was race-mixing between white and non-white people because such a social practice would compromise the prospect of white racial purity, white national purity, and global white supremacy. Similarly, U.S. naturalization law from 1790 to 1952 carried with it an explicit prerequisite of whiteness. For instance, the first U.S. Immigration and Naturalization law, in 1790, restricted naturalized citizenship to 鈥渁 free white [male], who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years.鈥�

Ultimately, framing white supremacy as exceptional, individualized, and through the language of disease obscures its origins and movements. As  argues, 鈥渨hiteness has a cash value鈥� that produces advantages and 鈥減rofits鈥� for white people in virtually all areas of social organization including housing, education, employment, and intergenerational wealth. Lipsitz continues: 鈥淲hite supremacy is usually less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt than a system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility鈥� and access to full and legitimate citizenship.

Those who continue to explain racial injustice through appeals to disease or illness implicitly reinforce a discourse that misdiagnoses the machinations of white supremacy. If we are truly to craft an antiracist politics capable of threatening the endurance of white supremacy, we must reject analyses and interventions that individualize social injustice by relying on notions of disease, mental illness, or deviance.

This article was originally published by . It has been edited for 大象传媒 Magazine.