The “Sick” Racist

Abstract

Since the early 1960s, there has been a movement among activists, scholars, and policymakers to redefine racism as a psychopathological condition, identifiable and treatable through psychotherapeutic and pharmacological interventions. This development reflects, and is reflected by, the popular framing among mass media and ordinary social actors of racism and racist events as individual pathology rather than as a social problem. This shifting perspective on racism, from a social problem and a system to an individual pathology, has increasingly become a part of academic and psychiatric discourse since Jim Crow. In this article, we have two aims: first, to trace the emergence of “psychopathological racism”; second, to illustrate the relationship between “psychopathological racism” and “colorblind racism” in the post-Civil Rights era. We argue that the psychopathological view of racism compliments colorblindness in that larger structural issues are dismissed in favor of individual pathos. Furthermore, psychopathological explanations for racism dismiss socio-political contexts, eschewing the contributions of well over fifty years of social scientific research in the process.

David Stafford-Clark (1916-1999): Seeing through a celebrity psychiatrist

“…The template for the post-war pathologization of racism had been set out in the USA, where Frankfurt School intellectuals, such as Theodor Adorno, were dissecting the racial attitudes of the defeated Nazi culture. The publication in 1950 of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al, 1950), a treatise that attempted to ‘frame racism as a psychopathological problem’ (Thomas & Byrd, 2016: 184), stimulated a growing and influential body of research and practice: ‘The notion that a sick society produces sick individuals would be a recurrent theme within mental health discourse through the 1950s and, consequently, would find itself within the claims of public officials and activists who drew upon the authority of medical and psychological science to make claims about the nature, and consequences, of extreme racism’ (Thomas & Byrd, 2016: 184). Stafford-Clark pursued this agenda in his own broadcasting and publishing, and throughout his career recycled ideas aired in his 1960 Robert Waley Cohen Memorial Lecture, The Psychology of Persecution and Prejudice (Stafford-Clark, 1960), and continued in such publications as ‘The Psychology of Prejudice and Persecution’ (Stafford-Clark, 1961b), and ‘The Psychology of Prejudice’ (Stafford-Clark, 1968).…”