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“If Adolf Hitler had interrupted his speech to the Reichstag, dropped his pants, and defecated on the floor, he would have been gently led away by men dressed in white, and we’d have never seen him again. Instead, he could stand there, spew hatred and murder, and few found anything wrong with it.”
I first heard this remark by a contemporary observer of the Nazi regime, many years ago. It introduced me to the notion of extreme bigotry as not only a severe character flaw but a downright mental defect. Since then, I have heard numerous variations of this argument.
“Racism is learned” suggests that racial hatred is the result of an individual’s socialization. “Anger and scapegoating increase in times of economic hardship” blames external factors for increasing prejudice and discrimination. Such statements propose that bigotry is something that befalls people, something that happens without deliberation. The logical extreme of this idea is that bigotry is a full-blown form of mental illness.
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Indeed, suggestions to treat extreme forms of racial, ethnic, and cultural hatred as a mental health issue are not new. In the 1960s, renowned psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Poussaint argued in favor of including racism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Others soon followed, and suggested that racism was, at least, affiliated with psychopathological issues.
Decades later, the DSM (currently in use in its 5th edition, and still the authorative mental disease classification system) has still not included racism and other forms of extreme bigotry. The reasons are not only limited to lacking consensus within the mental health professions. Declaring bigotry a medical issues raises countless social, legal and ethical challenges.
The main objection is, of course, that mental illness reduces, in principle, patients’ personal responsibility for their actions. One can easily imagine slick defense attorneys arguing that their clients just couldn’t help it, since their hate crimes were simply the result of their psychological incapacitation. Moreover, pronouncing bigotry a medical issue will eventually contribute to its normalization. After all, diseases are the result of natural processes, which just so happen to have detrimental effects in some cases.
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Sure enough, there is ample research identifying numerous natural causes for visceral outgroup aversion. Theories range from evolutionary models that suggest that in-group favoritism enhances adaptive fitness, to the human propensity for identity assertion, or the inherent need for social dominance.
However, these lines of research de-emphasize various critical facts that the scientific, and, more importantly, the legal and ethical evaluation of bigotry must not forget. First and foremost, people choose to be bigots. More candidly, people embrace bigotry because it is gratifying. Discrimination is not only beneficial when there is competition for scarce material resources. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison suggested (in a New Yorker article, published after the 2016 presidential election) that a powerful source of motivation is the comfort of being “naturally better than” of “not having to struggle or demand civil treatment”—a highly convincing argument.
However, even if bigotry is gratifying for its proponents, that alone does not necessarily invalidate the claim that it is a mental health condition. After all, various forms of illness come from choices that eventually results in pathological symptoms. The strong association of cigarette smoking and lung cancer comes to mind.
Pleasure seeking and mental illness often go hand-in-hand, as in the case of addictions. Addictions are a paradoxical type of behavior. We choose something that provides gratification in the short run—the calming effect of a cigarette, the adrenaline rush from gambling, the euphoria of cocaine, or the intense high of heroin. However, in the long run, we resent patterns of addictive behavior, despite their short-term benefits. In other words, people eventually suffer from addictions. Most addicts desperately seek to quit their habit multiple times. Many succeed only, if ever, after receiving professional help
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Bigots don’t suffer—and, therein lies the difference to the mentally ill. No matter what the circumstances, it is hard to think of someone who would love to quit hating people of a different color, immigrants, or other minorities, but just can’t get himself to do it. Granted, bigots may suffer from the consequences of their opinions and actions (e.g., social ostracization, marginalization, jail). But there is no personal suffering from their attitude per se, no involuntary entrapment in repeated behavioral patterns they cannot shake. Bigots choose to hate. They choose it, because it is gratifying.
There is, however, a great deal of suffering—by the victims of bigotry. The American Psychiatric Association has repeatedly suggested that the prolonged experience of discrimination may lead to heightened psychological stress, often to the extent of full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression.
A study published in 2000 in the Journal Ethnicity and Health proposed that repeated racism against African Americans often leads to the internalization of negative stereotypes, which results in detrimental long-term effects on socioeconomic status. In 2003, a study found that students of color regularly face discriminatory treatment on college campuses, and a 2007 study concluded that such experiences may account for the relatively low retention rates compared to white students.
It is important to keep in mind that such effects are not only the result of blatant racism and obvious transgressions. They are often caused by subtle racism, or repeated microagressions—insensitive remarks, ignorant stereotyping, and other forms of offensive, yet ambiguous, behavior.
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Given these far-reaching consequences evidence, it becomes obvious that the only ones who experience bigotry passively, involuntarily, and with extensive suffering are the victims. As for the perpetrators, their behavior is not so much a medical, but rather an ethical and, derived from that, a legal problem.
In fact, it is an exemplification of one of the most fundamental ethical problems. If we are not willing to formulate principles providing protection for those that have limited means to protect themselves, if we refuse to denounce the victimization of those that circumstance have placed in a disadvantaged position, if we don’t take a stance against resentment and spite, then there is little use for ethics, anyway.
So why are we so eager to explain bigotry, while omitting personal responsibility? Why are there so many explanations that insist that hatred of outgroup members is a somewhat natural process, something that overcomes the perpetrators?
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Perhaps we feel a little too uncomfortable facing the truth about our family, friends, and neighbors embracing resentment. Perhaps we want to convince ourselves that the hatred we witness is not so devastating, and our acceptance, therefore, not so shameful. Perhaps we need a little justification to silence the guilt over the choices we made in the secrecy of the voting booth.
But there is no running from personal responsibility, and no valid excuse for the acceptance of bigotry. After all, it is not the bigot who is sick, but the society tolerating him.
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