Bigotry as Mental Illness Or Just Another Norm
Published: January 15, 2000
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Dr. Poussaint credits politics -- the women's movement and gay rights activists -- not better science, for overturning faulty psychiatric doctrine. His own politicking to change the association's opinion on racism has so far been less successful. In the mid-1960's, Dr. Poussaint joined other civil rights workers in Mississippi, where he helped desegregate the hospitals. The bigotry he witnessed among the region's white psychiatrists as well as a spate of racist killings convinced him to act.
Along with seven other black psychiatrists, Dr. Poussaint appealed to the organization to add racism to the D.S.M.-IV. Their request was turned down. ''Let's say that group of black psychiatrists had been in control of establishing what the diagnoses should be in the D.S.M.,'' Dr. Poussaint says now. ''In some way, racism would be in that book.''
Perhaps. Today, many of Dr. Poussaint's black colleagues say a D.S.M. label would actually be counterproductive. ''Racism is so deeply ingrained in our culture that to try to identify individuals who are racist is in some ways to trivialize the depth and breadth of the problem,'' says James Jones, a professor of social psychology at the University of Delaware and the director of the minority fellowships program at the American Psychological Association. Others believe that pathologizing racism would inadvertently give racists a legal defense for hate crimes.
On the whole, psychiatrists were probably more disposed to treat racism as a mental illness 50 years ago than today. In the 1950's, the profession even flirted with a quasi-medical definition of racism, although at the behest of the American Jewish Committee, not American blacks. In 1950, four scholars published an influential study titled ''The Authoritarian Personality.'' Three of the authors were Jewish. Two of them, including the philosopher Theodor Adorno, were refugees from Nazi Germany.
Their goal was to explain Hitler's genocidal anti-Semitism. Based on their evaluations of more than 2,000 American adults, the authors concluded that extreme racist tendencies were associated with an abnormal ''personality syndrome'' that they labeled authoritarian. Not a D.S.M.-IV diagnosis exactly, but almost.
By the end of the decade, however, the theory underlying ''The Authoritarian Personality'' had been substantially revised. The book was found to have serious methodological problems, and efforts to test the hypothesis yielded mixed results. The Harvard psychologist Thomas Pettigrew struck a decisive blow. Mr. Pettigrew examined racist attitudes in eight American towns, four in the North, four in the South. In the Northern towns, he found some correlation of racist attitudes with the syndrome described in ''The Authoritarian Personality.'' In the South, however, he found that racism was so common it was merely a social norm. ''You almost had to be mentally ill to be tolerant in the South,'' says Mr. Pettigrew, now a retired professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. ''The authoritarian personality was a good explanation at the individual level but not at the societal level.''
By the dawn of the civil rights era, psychiatrists had largely abandoned racism to social psychologists like Mr. Pettigrew who helped formulate today's model. ''Racism has very much been depathologized,'' says Janet Schofield, a social psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies racial attitudes among children. ''There's been a major shift from being influenced by things like the authoritarian personality to thinking of stereotyping and prejudice as a consequence of normal psychological processes.''
Bombarded with information, she says, people tend to rely on general concepts. Just as Americans divide daybeds, settees and chaise longues into ''chairs'' and ''sofas,'' they divide people into categories based to a degree on stereotypes. ''Racism,'' says Ms. Schofield, ''may be the result of inevitable processes.''
This is an explanation for racism, not an excuse. But Dr. Poussaint's final appeal is to common sense: ''If you have a mental process that leads some people to commit genocide, how can you not think that's a mental disorder?''
Photos: Bigotry takes many forms, among them menace and death. At left, the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in 1963. (Claude Sitton for The New York Times); Below left, a Kosovo marketplace where a bomb left six dead and 60 wounded last year. (Alan Chin for The New York Times); Below, Joseph Goebbels and Hitler at a Nazi rally in Berlin in 1933. (United Press International)(pg. B11)