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WORK TITLE: Are Racists Crazy?
WORK NOTES: with Sander L. Gilman
PSEUDONYM(S): Thomas, James Michael
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://jamesmichaelthomas.wordpress.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://socanth.olemiss.edu/james-thomas/ * http://socanth.olemiss.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/154/2017/01/jthomas-cv.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Kansas City, MO.
EDUCATION:University of Missouri, B.A. (psychology), 2004, B.A. (sociology), 2004, M.A., 2005, Ph.D., 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Heart of Missouri United Way, community impact director, 2012; University of Mississippi, visiting assistant professor, 2012-14; assistant professor, 2014-.
Has also participated in numerous panels and given invited lectures. Editorial board member, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and Contexts.
MEMBER:American Sociological Association, Society for the Study of Social Problems, Association for Humanist Sociology, Southern Sociological Society.
AWARDS:Has received numerous study and research grants.
WRITINGS
Has contributed articles to periodicals, including Contexts, Ethnogarphy, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Sociology Compass. Has contributed chapters to books, including Human Rights: Social, Political, and Economic Inequalities in a Globalizing World, edited by Angela Hattery, David. G. Embrick, and Earl Smith, Rowman & Littlefield., 2008; Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective, edited by Julius Adekunle and Hettie V. Williams, University Press of America, 2010; The Art of Social Critique: Painting Mirrors of Social Life, edited by Shawn Bingham, Lexington Books, 2012; and The Handbook of Sociology and Human Rights, edited by David L. Brunsma, Keri Iyall Smith, and Brian Gran, Paradigm Publishers, 2013.
SIDELIGHTS
James M. Thomas found his way to sociology early in life. As he put it at his website: “My mother was a leader of a neighborhood coalition that stretched across this historic dividing line, and I was often struck by the contrast between the interracial social space of the neighborhood meeting, and the intra-racial makeup of the block where our home was situated. In addition, riding the Metro (our city bus system) everyday, I grew a strong appreciation for the diversity of urban life – economic, social, cultural, and political.” Thomas went on to earn bachelor’s degrees in sociology and psychology from the University of Misssissippi and then obtained master’s and doctorate degrees there. He worked first at the Heart of Missouri United Way as a community impact director before becoming a visiting assistant professor and then assistant professor at his alma mater.
Thomas has written three books, Affective Labour: (Dis)assembling Distance and Difference (with Jennifer G. Correa), Working to Laugh: Assembling Difference in American Stand-Up Comedy (an extension of his dissertation), and Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity (with Sander L. Gilman). At his website, Thomas described the focus of his work, saying that his “research has been driven by questions within two interrelated fields of inquiry: histories of race and racism, and contemporary practices of race and racism.” In this vein his third book, according to the New York University Press website, looks at the “connection and science behind race, racism, and mental illness.”
A Publishers Weekly reviewer described the author’s intent to outline and study the “change from pathologizing race . . . to pathologizing racism.” The critic noted that the authors “make their case methodically, with rigorous, far-reaching scholarship.” A correspondent at Kirkus Reviews found the theoretical descriptions to be “clear, spot-on summations” and concluded that the book represented a”sharp contribution to a significant topic that continues to generate heated discussion and debate.” Writing at his eponymous website, Amos Lassen praised the book as a “framework that helps us understand the science behind race and racism” that offers “persuasive arguments” for viewing the problem from a deeper perspective. Reviewing Are Racists Crazy? at his website, Francis Tapon faulted the “academic writing style and political correctness.” Even so, he thought the discussion is “filled with interesting facts about the race debate over the centuries.” On the Slate website, Rebecca Onion focused on the authors’ argument that individuals must accept responsibility for racism: “The disease metaphor of racism has given a century and a half of liberal anti-racists hope for a cure for prejudice. But it doesn’t work, and in the process, it gives too many people an out.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, October 3, 2016, review of Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity, p. 110.
ONLINE
Francis Tapon Website, http://francistapon.com/ (June 2, 2017), Francis Tapon, review of Are Racists Crazy?
James M. Thomas Website, https://jamesmichaelthomas.wordpress.com (June 25, 2017).
Kirkus Reviews, https://www.kirkusreviews.com (October 18, 2016), review of Are Racists Crazy?
New York University Press Website, https://nyupress.org/ (June 25, 2017), description of Are Racists Crazy?
Reviews by Amos Lassen, http://reviewsbyamoslassen.com/ (June 2, 2017), Amos Lassen, review of Are Racists Crazy?
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (June 2, 2017), Rebecca Onion, review of Are Racists Crazy?*
James M. Thomas
Biography | Publications | CV | Personal Website
Google Scholar
James M. Thomas
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Ph.D, University of Missouri
Lamar Hall 514 | 662-915-7430
jmthoma4@olemiss.edu
Office Hours
Wednesdays 2:00-4:00, by appointment only
Courses
Soc 101 Introductory Sociology
Soc 311 Social Problems
Soc 345 Population Trends & Problems
Soc 403 Empire and Revolution (cross-listed as Anth 403)
Soc 413 Race and Ethnicity
Soc 427 Social Stratification
Soc 451 Topics in Sociology
Biography
I was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, about three blocks away from the historic ‘red-line’ of the central city, 63rd and Troost, which was used by real estate and government officials to demarcate white and nonwhite neighborhoods. My mother was a leader of a neighborhood coalition that stretched across this historic dividing line, and I was often struck by the contrast between the interracial social space of the neighborhood meeting, and the intra-racial makeup of the block where our home was situated. In addition, riding the Metro (our city bus system) everyday, I grew a strong appreciation for the diversity of urban life – economic, social, cultural, and political. My mother, a college librarian for thirty-seven years, helped cultivate my interests in reading, writing, and activism.
From Kansas City, I attended the University of Missouri in Columbia, where I graduated with my B.A. in both Psychology and Sociology in 2004. For the next year, I worked as a Youth Specialist with Missouri’s Division of Youth Services, counseling juvenile felony offenders in a minimum-security group home in Columbia Missouri. In 2005, I re-enrolled at the University of Missouri as a graduate student in the Sociology program. Falling in love with the process of critical inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge, I decided to continue my studies after obtaining my M.A. in Sociology in 2005, sticking around for my Ph.D. in Sociology, which I finished in 2011 along with a graduate minor in Women’s and Gender Studies.
My dissertation research focused on the role of stand-up comedy venues in the production of contentious politics. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at three different sites where stand-up comedy took place: a professional comedy club, a self-described punk/rock/horror/sci-fi bar that hosted a weekly amateur comedy show, and a popular drag revue at an LGBT nightclub. Upon finishing my Ph.D., this research served to frame my first full-length book project, Working to Laugh (Lexington Press, 2014), in which I situate the stand-up comedy club within the larger context of urban nightlife. Taking what Michael Ian Borer describes as the “urban culturalist perspective”, I interrogate the dynamics between space, power, and cultural practice within these scenes. Drawing conceptual strength from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, I frame the work involved in the production, distribution, and circulation of collective feelings of ‘good times’ within stand-up comedy clubs, and urban nightlife more generally, as a form of affective labor. I then argue that it is affective labor which contributes to, and contests, the reproduction of racial, class, and heteronormative orders within urban nightlife.
Speaking at the 12th Social Theory Forum, University of Massachusetts Boston.
Since completing my dissertation research, I have embarked on two other projects that reflect my interests in race, racism, their histories, and their contemporary practices. The first project seeks to uncover the complex and contested meanings of diversity, inclusion, and civil discourse that exist within American higher education. Specifically, I ask the following questions: How might colleges and universities, conventionally understood as sites where diversity and inclusion are valued, actually contribute to exclusion based on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation? What kinds of messages about diversity and inclusion matter most to colleges and universities? Finally, how do the students, faculty, and staff tasked with the informal and formal work of diversity understand this work within the context of the messages about diversity and inclusion produced by their institutions? A preliminary design for this project was awarded funding from the ASA Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline Award in September of 2013. A second project, for which I am a co-author, examines the genealogies of race and racism as psychopathological categories from mid-19th century Europe and the United States up to the present day. Examining scholarly journals, speeches by civil rights leaders and politicians, and mass media, this project aims to account for how the 19th century ‘Sciences of Man’, including anthropology, medicine, and biology, used race as a means of defining psychopathology at the beginning of modern clinical psychiatry, and, subsequently, how these claims about race and madness became embedded within claims of those disciplines that deal with mental health and illness. Finally, this project looks to illuminate the post-World War II shift in explaining racism as a social, political, and cultural consequence to that of a pathological byproduct. This project is currently under contract with New York University Press, and we expect to have a completed draft by October of 2015. When not conducting research or teaching, I enjoy spending time with my family, cooking, and consuming massive quantities of television through Netflix and Hulu. I’m also a gym rat, spending roughly an hour every weekday morning lifting weights, jumping rope, and generally trying to relive the athletic glory days of my younger years.
CV: http://socanth.olemiss.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/154/2017/01/jthomas-cv.pdf
About
I was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, about three blocks away from the historic ‘red-line’ of the central city, 63rd and Troost, which was used by real estate and government officials to demarcate white and nonwhite neighborhoods. My mother was a leader of a neighborhood coalition that stretched across this historic dividing line, and I was often struck by the contrast between the interracial social space of the neighborhood meeting, and the intra-racial makeup of the block where our home was situated. In addition, riding the Metro (our city bus system) everyday, I grew a strong appreciation for the diversity of urban life – economic, social, cultural, and political. My mother, a college librarian for thirty-seven years, helped cultivate my interests in reading, writing, and activism.
From Kansas City, I attended the University of Missouri in Columbia, where I graduated with my B.A. in both Psychology and Sociology in 2004. For the next year, I worked as a Youth Specialist with Missouri’s Division of Youth Services, counseling juvenile felony offenders in a minimum-security group home in Columbia Missouri. In 2005, I re-enrolled at the University of Missouri as a graduate student in the Sociology program. Falling in love with the process of critical inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge, I decided to continue my studies after obtaining my M.A. in Sociology in 2005, sticking around for my Ph.D. in Sociology, which I finished in 2011 along with a graduate minor in Women’s and Gender Studies.
Upon completing my doctorate, I began working as the Community Impact Director for Heart of Missouri – United Way. In the Fall of 2012, I left my position with United Way for a Visiting Assistant Professor position within the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Mississippi, and was offered a full-time, tenure-track position with the department beginning in the Fall of 2014.
Research Interests
To date, my research has been driven by questions within two interrelated fields of inquiry: histories of race and racism, and contemporary practices of race and racism. Throughout my scholarship—published and ongoing—I employ a variety of interpretive methods to illuminate how meanings of race and racism arise within certain socio-cultural contexts, and how social actors reproduce and contest those meanings in everyday practices and encounters.
Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity
263.40 (Oct. 3, 2016): p110.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity
Sander L. Gilman and James M. Thomas. New York Univ., $35 (368p) ISBN 978-1-47985612-1
At a moment when race has resurfaced as an urgent part of the American discourse, Gilman (Seeing the Insane) and Thomas (Affective Labor) critically examine shifting views on race in the social sciences during the 20th century. The authors central project is mapping the change from pathologizing race (characterizing Jewish and black people as more susceptible to mental illnesses) to pathologizing racism. They describe how some Jewish psychiatrists at the start of the 20th century accepted the argument that those of their faith were more prone to hysteria, and how asylums in the post-emancipation South tried to treat black patients by recreating the conditions of slavery. The writers locate the central switch in attitudes in the aftermath of WWII, when the world was looking to the nascent fields of social and behavioral science to explain how the people of Germany came to commit such atrocities. This coincided with the birth of the civil rights movement, and led to examinations of the mental toll racism exacts on its victims and eventually, controversially, the costs to its perpetrators. Gilman and Thomas make their case methodically, with rigorous, far-reaching scholarship. They provide no easy answers but plenty of food for thought amid Americas current crisis in race relations. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity." Publishers Weekly, 3 Oct. 2016, p. 110. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466166623&it=r&asid=4b27893ad51541d83286b681e16e4a8e. Accessed 2 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466166623
ARE RACISTS CRAZY?
How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity
by Sander L. Gilman, James M. Thomas
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A tour d’horizon of the historical relationship among race, racism, and mental illness.
Although Gilman (Liberal Arts and Sciences and Psychiatry/Emory Univ.; Seeing the Insane, 2013, etc.) and Thomas (Sociology/Univ. of Mississippi; Working to Laugh: Assembling Difference in American Stand-Up Comedy Venues, 2015, etc.) journey as far back as the Enlightenment, the meat of their investigation covers the period from the 19th century to the present—and the meat is occasionally chewy, with demands placed on readers to be conversant with, say, “the crowd as a forensic concept has its origins in the Lombrosian criminal psychiatry.” Nonetheless, in the authors’ tracking of the great shift from pathologizing race to pathologizing racism, they cut through a broad swath of theorists, many of whom will be known to general readers. Furthermore, the clear, spot-on summations of the familiar theorists allow readers a measure of comfort in the treatment of less-known theorists (until the necessary supplementary reading can be done). Throughout, it’s clear that what galls Gilman and Thomas is the expropriation of the subject by one branch of learning or another, juggling among medicine, sociology, biology, and psychiatry. Jews and blacks, understandably, are the subjects of much study, with the notion of race defined first in physiology, then the susceptibility of disease, and then the inability to find social adaptation. Ultimately, scientific racism moves “from overwhelmingly a biological condition to a socially constructed category.” Although the historical transit over the subject alone makes the book valuable, equally useful are the authors’ explorations of interiority, hatred, and crowd thinking. They examine Gabriel Tarde’s laws of imitation; how Wilhelm Reich bridged the gap between Karl Marx and Freud; and, most illuminatingly, “conjunction,” a “crisis between politics, science, and ideology...a period during which the different social, political, economic, and ideological contradictions that are at work in a society come together to give [racism] a specific shape.”
A sharp contribution to a significant topic that continues to generate heated discussion and debate.
Pub Date: Dec. 20th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4798-5612-1
Page count: 368pp
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18th, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1st, 2016
“Are Racists Crazy?: How Prejudice, Racism, and Anti-Semitism Became Markers of Insanity” by Sander L. Gilman and James M. Thomas— A Mental Illness?
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are-racists-crazy
Gilman, Sander L. and James M. Thomas. “Are Racists Crazy?: How Prejudice, Racism, and Anti-Semitism Became Markers of Insanity”, NYU Press, 2016.
A Mental Illness?
Amos Lassen
Based on clinical experiments, a interdisciplinary team of doctors at the University of Oxford in 2012 announced that with the beta-blocker drug, Propranolol, they could reduce implicit racial bias. Time Magazine, shortly after this announcement asked the if racism was becoming a mental illness in an article about the study. Sander Gilman and James Thomas in “Art Racists Crazy?” chronicle the idea of race and racism as psychopathological categories (from mid-19th century Europe, to contemporary America, up to the clinical experiment at Oxford). They question that racism has become a mental illness and use historical, archival, and content analysis to attempt to find an answer. They show how the 19th century ‘Sciences of Man’ (anthropology, medicine, and biology) used race as a means of defining psychopathology and explain how assertions about race and madness have become part of the disciplines that deal with mental health and illness. The study connects past and present claims about race and racism, showing the dangerous implications of this specious line of thought for today and is a study of the history of the studies of racism, anti-Semitism, and psychopathology.
Gilman and Thomas give us a framework that helps us understand the science behind race and racism with evidence and persuasive arguments for why a it is not enough to treat racism and hate medically but we must understand how it is constructed in order to end it. There are no easy answers but there is a lot to think about here. We see how anti-Semitism played such “a powerful, even dominant role in the way scholars and researchers have approached the subject matter, whether in Europe, the United States, or South Africa”.
This is a study of the deep structures of racism that provides us with the scientific frameworks that try to explain ‘otherness’ by “sometimes affirming it and sometimes denying it”. We also become very aware of the political connections between race and science.
Are Racists Crazy? A book by Gilman and Thomas
book review
Cover of Are Racists Crazy?
Cover of Are Racists Crazy?
Everyone loves books with provocative questions as their titles. Are Racists Crazy? strikes that nerve. Now that's even better than the title of another book that I read recently: What if There Were No Whites in South Africa?
Unfortunately, Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity reminds me of What if there were no whites in South Africa? It doesn't leave you with a definitive answer.
Perhaps that's my fault. I come in with expectations of having a simple YES/NO conclusion, when clearly the question is nuanced and complex, which explains why you need a book to answer it.
The pitch for the book indicates that
In 2012, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that - based on their clinical experiment - the beta-blocker drug, Propranolol, could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Shortly after the experiment, an article in Time Magazine cited the study, posing the question: Is racism becoming a mental illness?
In Are Racists Crazy? Sander Gilman and James Thomas trace the idea of race and racism as psychopathological categories., from mid-19th century Europe, to contemporary America, up to the aforementioned clinical experiment at the University of Oxford, and ask a slightly different question than that posed by Time: How did racism become a mental illness?
Using historical, archival, and content analysis, the authors provide a rich account of how the 19th century ‘Sciences of Man’ - including anthropology, medicine, and biology - used race as a means of defining psychopathology and how assertions about race and madness became embedded within disciplines that deal with mental health and illness.
Co-authors Sander Gilman (American cultural and literary historian) and James Thomas (sociologist) do an excellent job at covering the long history of the science of racism. In the last 200 years (ever since whites started to wonder if perhaps blacks are not sub-human), scientists have debated the issue of race.
You might expect a linear progression throughout history, where the science of racism marches lock-step with the liberal notion that we should not be racists. You'd be wrong.
Instead, what the authors show, is that scientists have gone back and forth about whether a concept of race even ought to exist.
Rejoice Tapon on her wedding dayOff to a bad start
Right from the start, the authors take their classic liberal "enlightened" stand. They define race as:
Unstable
Shaped by historical, material, and discursive forces
Without basis in human biology, anatomy, or physiology
Nevertheless, ontologically real, in the sense that the category has been, and remains, a fundamental organizer of political, social, and economic opportunities.
Point #3 in their list above smacks as the classic politically correct ideology that is completely oblivious to the obvious biological, anatomical, and physiological differences between races. Are they really so blind that they can't tell the physical difference between Africans, Asians, and Caucasians?
They might as well claim that there are no physical differences between men and women while they're at it.
They're so caught up in their politically correct academic bubble that they've lost all common sense. That opening definition made me lose hope in the book. I hoped for a nuanced and objective analysis, but when someone denies obvious physical racial differences, I lose confidence. My African wife (pictured on the right) laughs at such ludicrous claims. When I read that part of the book to her, she shook her head and said, "What a bunch of idiots."
For those who agree with these professors, you must read A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade, former New York Times Science Editor. It's a courageous book that takes on the sociologists who have managed to outshout all discourse and debate on racial differences by labeling anyone who suggests their existence as a "racist."
So what's the point of the book?
Gilman and Thomas say:
We aim to show how the relationship of an "expert system" of race science permeates Western society's production of racial meaning.
What the hell does that mean? With sentences like that, you can tell this is yet another team of academic writers who fail to write for the layperson. They want to sound like professors, but then they forget that professors are the masters of making a lot of vague statements.
They argue that "the role of the state in the production of racial meaning has been overdetermined."
Another odd sentence.
Is racism a disorder?
In 1978, Carl Bell presented a paper entitled, "Racism: A Symptom of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder." This was a major salvo in the effort to shift the scientific focus away from studying race to studying racism. Bell deemed racism to be a "psychopathological defect."
The authors avoid taking a strong stand regarding this debate. For example, the authors point out that Car Bell may make sense. Just because you're a bit depressed doesn't mean you're clinically depressed and need medication. Similarly, not all racists ought to be given drugs and treated. It's a spectrum.
Still, in 2012, Oxford researchers proposed to make a pill against hatred. Is the anti-racism pill next?
Racists don't just target blacks
Although the authors annoyed me at times with their jargon and academic-speak, there are several parts of the book that I found illuminating. For instance, the authors successfully "trace the shifting meanings of race and racism" throughout the centuries.
I liked that they document that blacks haven't been the only group that has suffered racism.
Hispanics have suffered. The Mexican Repatriation of 1925 to 1931 kicked out two million people of Mexican descent out of the USA. The authors inexplicably claim that "This expulsion of Mexican immigrants was a direct result of the Great Depression." The Great Depression didn't start until October 1929. So how could the Repatriation, which started in 1925, be the "direct result" of the Great Depression?
Chinese have also been heavily discriminated against in the USA. "In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended all immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years, and disallowed any federal court to admit Chinese immigrants for citizenship; this act was not repealed until 1943." (Loc 1509 of Kindle edition.)
Intelligence and race
Of course, the authors disbelieve any intellectual difference between races, but they cite some revealing surveys. For example, "The U.S. Army's Alpha Tests during World War I proved to most social scientists' satisfaction that blacks benefited from environmental change: though blacks had scored lower than whites across the board on intelligence exams, Northern blacks scored higher than Southern blacks and Southern whites." (Loc 2741).
I'll offer one fascinating excerpt about how all races view blacks as intellectually inferior to whites. Yes, even blacks don't think too highly of themselves when it comes to the brains department:
The general social survey revealed the relationship between race and intelligence. Using a scale of 1 to 7, respondents were asked to evaluate the intelligence of a variety of groups, including blacks and whites. Responses revealed at both whites and blacks perceive whites as more intelligent than blacks. Additionally, blacks perception of superior white intellect were greater than whites. In 2014, 46% of blacks perceived white intelligence to be at a 5 or above, compared to the 42% of blacks perceived black intelligence to be at a 5 or above. Among whites, 40% in 2014 perceived white intelligence to be at a 5 or above, compared to the 28% of whites who perceive black intelligence to be a 5 or above. (Loc 4560)
The authors admit that there is a divide between academic branches. For example, they cite an interesting survey that shows that the majority of psychologists and sociologists agreed that the data about whether "blacks are inherently mentally inferior or equal to whites" are inconclusive. However, psychologists were five times more likely than sociologists to say that the latest data shows that blacks are mentally inferior to whites (25% vs. 5%). (Loc 1225 in the Kindle edition).
Similarly, 23% of psychologists believe that the IQ data shows that mulattos (half black, half white) are mentally superior to "pure" blacks. Meanwhile, not one sociologist in the survey agreed with those psychologists. The majority of both psychologists and sociologists said the data supporting that hypothesis is "inconclusive." This all goes to show that sociologists will be the last people on the planet to admit that racial differences exist.
Jews have overcome centuries of racism. For example, Gilman (a Jew) discusses the "blood libel" that Jews suffered. Christians claimed that Jews used Christian blood in their religious rituals. Yet Jews have the highest IQ among all major ethnic groups. They are also some of the successful groups economically. Therefore, when some blacks blame racism as the sole reason behind their statistically below average IQs, the excuse is unconvincing. There's more to the story.
Racism obviously exists. Prior to 1967, 41 US states and territories prohibited interracial marriage at some point in their history. Also, 22 states restricted interracial sex. I'm glad I was born after 1967.
One interesting part of the book quoted a writer who defined two terms:
Racism refers to individual attitudes and expressions hostile and denigratory toward people categorized as a particular race.
Racialism refers the belief in the reality of races and the scientific validity of analyzing human affairs and human diversity in terms of racial differences.
In other words, I understood that a racialist would say, "Races not only exist, but there are measurable differences between them. We ought to study them to understand them. We shouldn't deny them, nor try to impede research or debate simply because racial differences are inconvenient or against our ideal preferences. However, just because racial differences exist, doesn't mean that anyone has the right to discriminate against a particular race. Racism is never justified."
In that interpretation, I'm a racialist.
I also learned another word I hadn't heard: miscegenation. It's the interbreeding of different races. If my African wife and I have a baby, some would condemn our miscegenation.
The authors also motivated me to read a book I had never heard of called The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. My wife and I will be listening to the audiobook while we're driving through Burundi in December 2016.
Conclusion
As you can tell from my review, I'm a bit torn about Are Racists Crazy?
The academic writing style and political correctness bothered me.
Still, the book is filled with interesting facts about the race debate over the centuries.
If you're curious why some think that racists ought to be thrown in mental institutions and/or given pills to correct their mental disability, then this book is for you.
For those who are on the fence, then you may feel like I do: that this is a slightly average book.
VERDICT: 6 out 10
Nov. 17 2016 6:02 PM
Is Racism a Disease?
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Is a psychological diagnosis a useful way to view racism—or does it merely absolve the racist of blame?
By Rebecca Onion
Donald Trump
Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Bloomington, Illinois, on March 13.
Jim Young/Reuters
At the 1934 public mock trial of Adolf Hitler, organized by the American Jewish Congress and held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, professor of medicine Lewellys F. Barker defined Hitlerism as “a ‘psychic epidemic’ … an abnormal emotional mass movement that reminds us of the Dark Ages.” Barker argued, to a crowd of 20,000: “To understand Hitler and Hitlerism, one is compelled to enter the domain of psychopathology.” At the bitter end of an election season full of armchair diagnoses—what’s wrong with Donald Trump? What’s wrong with his supporters?—the scene feels frighteningly familiar. But is a psychological diagnosis ever a useful way to view racism? Or does it merely absolve the racist of blame for his actions?
Rebecca Onion Rebecca Onion
Rebecca Onion is a Slate staff writer and the author of Innocent Experiments.
In a forthcoming book, Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity, historian Sander Gilman and sociologist James M. Thomas look at the centurieslong project to pinpoint the psychological origins of racism. Over the years, psychologists, doctors, and sociologists have wrangled over the source of racial prejudice, with some arguing that this “madness” is inspired by the toxic influence of a crowd and others looking to an individual’s particular neurology for answers.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, people thinking about the relationship between psychology and race weren’t thinking about the source of racial prejudice. Instead, they emphasized nonwhite people’s supposed biological predisposition to mental illness. “With very few exceptions, everyone across the board in the West—England, the United States, Canada, France—working in the sciences, and in popular culture, believed that. It was a truism,” Gilman told me. One example: Using numbers from the 1840 census, which discovered a high rate of insanity among free black people in the North, pro-slavery mid-19th-century reformers and physicians argued that Southern black people needed slavery to thrive. (That these 1840 numbers were contested, notably by Edward Jarvis, a physician who wrote a critique of the census findings in 1844, meant little to people who were looking for medical evidence for black inferiority.)
Scientists have since taken a centurylong turn away from thinking about race as a biological category, instead investing in the idea that it’s a social construct, and the belief that minority groups might have innate psychological traits in common has lost its appeal. But at the same time, Gilman and Thomas argue, the quest to understand racism as a group sickness has accelerated. Theorists fixated on the actions of crowds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and this field of study was a gateway to a new analysis of racial prejudice. As World War I approached, observers outside Germany struggled to understand its politics, writing studies of its “national character.” Building on an 1895 work by French physician Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, British neurosurgeon Wilfred Trotter wrote Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916), a case study of German group consciousness. Peering in at Germany’s psychology, Trotter marveled at the hatred Germans ginned up for England, diagnosing it as primal or biological: “The fact that it was possible to organize so unanimous a howl shows very clearly how fully the psychological mechanisms of the wolf were in action.”
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In the mid-1930s, as Hitler rose, Germans became prime examples of people infected by prejudice and object lessons for psychologists trying to understand the way racism operated as groupthink. Psychologist Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) argued that racism was “a symptom of sexual repression in the mind of the authoritarian racist.” A racist, Reich believed, was likely raised in a kind of family that denied its children’s sexuality and created tractable individuals, who could easily be guided by a strong state.
During wartime, in the United States, the study of social psychology blossomed, as the threat from Hitler and his followers became all too clear. “If racism was a symptom of the psychopathology of fascism,” Gilman and Thomas write, “understanding the fascist mind had to be one of the operative undertakings of the war effort.” A project at the University of California at Berkeley worked on the question of susceptibility to authoritarianism, which resulted in the creation of a personality test called the F-scale and the 1950 volume The Authoritarian Personality. The researchers found that authoritarians tended to express prejudice against a diverse range of minority groups, to identify with the strong as opposed to the weak, and to be fascinated by the “deviant” sex lives of others.
These diagnostic efforts to understand German psychology had a purpose: avoiding the rise of other fascisms worldwide and proposing measures for German rehabilitation in the postwar period. The Institute for Social Research at Columbia University, host to exiled members of the Frankfurt School, looked at prejudice as a mass psychosis, fixable by certain measures of re-education. Psychiatrist Richard Brickner’s 1943 book Is Germany Incurable? proposed “a vast educational program” to correct Germany’s “paranoid contagion,” once the war should be won. If an occupying government were to school German children in tolerance, Brickner thought German adults could be reached, and their minds changed, in their own homes. Brickner’s proposal was not uncontroversial, Gilman and Thomas write, noting that psychologist Erich Fromm responded to Brickner by arguing that to cast Germany’s actions as a sickness served as “a substitute for valid ethical concepts,” tending to “weaken the sense for moral values, by calling something by a psychiatric term when it should be called plainly evil.”
(Gilman and Thomas are careful to point out that, amid these efforts to understand the racist mind, mass psychological diagnoses of the problems of nonwhite groups continued apace—resulting in postwar projects such as the Clark doll test, which diagnosed black children with endemic self-hatred, induced by experiences of segregation. While these postwar projects were generally sympathetic toward minority groups, the effect, Gilman and Thomas argue, was still to pathologize those affected by racism on the basis of their race, while absolving the racist majority by diagnosing racism as a collective madness.)
Between the civil rights era and today, psychologists in the United States have shifted from a crowd-based explanatory model to an attempt to identify individual cognitive explanations for racism—a neuroscientific approach that promises specific treatment plans, perhaps even a pill that doctors might one day prescribe to reduce implicit bias. While a pill for racism remains a thought experiment, the use of the term disease to describe racism is increasingly common in popular culture. When high-profile people are caught making racist or anti-Semitic statements, they often offer apologies that tap into the language of therapy: “I have begun an ongoing program of recovery,” Mel Gibson said in a formal statement after being caught on tape in an anti-Semitic rant during a DUI arrest in 2006. Pathological language around racism is also increasing, Gilman and Thomas write, in “scholarly articles, treatment protocols, academic conference presentations, and ‘shoptalk’ among behavioral and social scientists.”
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What did John Kerry, AL Gore and Hillary Clinton hAve in common? That they were beaten because of racism? No. That they were uninspiring, boring politicians that didn't appeal to people. More...
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After looking at the long history of psychology’s approach to racism, Gilman has come to the conclusion that we’ve gone around in circles. “There’s been a lot of discussion lately of ‘baskets of deplorables,’ ” Gilman said. “Of notions that groups of people, by definition, hold racist views.” But, he went on, “what that does is eliminates any responsibility for the individual. Racism is not an unconscious following of a leader—Trump, Hitler, whatever—but rather a whole set of individual people making choices.”
The disease metaphor of racism has given a century and a half of liberal anti-racists hope for a cure for prejudice. But it doesn’t work, and in the process, it gives too many people an out. “Let’s not avoid responsibility,” Gilman begged, echoing Fromm’s World War II–era plea. “Let’s make sure people who say evil things, who do evil things, who believe evil things have to take responsibility.”