Race, Mental Health, and Bad Faith
The conventional contemporary story about mental health, loosely adapted from Freud, is that if you don’t have a chemical imbalance, then something happened to interrupt your normal development, and the traumatic interruption was driven to the unconscious where it pops up in all manners of untoward behaviors. So if we can figure out what it is, bring it to consciousness, deal with it, then you have a shot at regaining a normal development, and you’ll stop getting in your own way, and you’ll be on your way to achieving the objects of your normal desire.
My big issue with this approach is that it’s therapy without ethics insofar as it doesn’t take interpersonal institutions seriously. It’s all about how to get yourself out of your own way, not so much about how to be with other people in a way that preserves their freedom. It also assumes the normal development of White life doesn’t induce psychopathy.
At worst, but unfortunately common, I’ve seen therapy make people worse, more self-absorbed, and less ethically sophisticated. I think this is more confusing for Black communities because their problems aren’t simply a matter of a traumatic arrested development due to a traumatic event as much as it is a matter of living in an internal colony run by psychopathic White people, under a standing order of degradation. This is what Dr. Bobby Wright gets right in The Psychopathic Racial Personality and Other Essays.
The problem is that the conventional model assumes that an individual’s normal development in White society is healthy. However, if you assume that the cultural institutions of White society sustain a psychopathy — marked by a persistent unaccountability to reason for thinking about the their role in violently degrading of Black life — then Black life in America makes a lot more sense. So does depression in White communities.
Wright argues that White people act in a psychopathic way towards Blacks in these ways:
- self-centered
- disregard for the rights of others
- violent
- unfeeling
- almost complete absence of ethical and moral development
- make commitments they do not intend to keep
- get angry when their integrity is called into question
- unable to accept blame or learn from experience
- lack of discipline or respect for authority
- take advantage of blacks without any guilt, anxiety or threat to their self-esteem
- unable to love deeply leading to sexual inadequacy — leading to rape, castration and hypersexualization of blacks.
We could have made the US whole by now, but we have cultural systems that sustain White psychopathy. We have to stop pretending that White people are moral agents emancipated from this psychopathy, and instead, treat them more like alcoholics, who are at best in recovery. And while in recovery, they still have a disposition for psychopathy, if surrounded by the appropriate context. The task is two-fold. Turn White psychopaths into recovering psychopaths, and address the institutions that reproduce and sustain White psychopathy.
This is why recovering addicts do better when they change up their habits and friend sets. But the disposition towards White psychopathy isn’t a biological tick in the same way that alcoholism can be associated with genetic markers; rather, it’s sustained by their social position. (This is where Jason Stanley’s work in How Propaganda Works is so helpful. It argues how epistemological injustice is held in place by social position. That’s a fancy way of saying, “I don’t have to take anything you say as true because you are low class/Black/White/woman/man/gay/straight or some combination of your social position allows me to ignore what you say.” It’s a matter of injustice because the authority of the speaker’s testimony is filtered through unjust distinctions between persons and hierarchies, rather than have the argument be accountable on its own merits or accountable to empirical evidence.)
Bad faith is most aptly characterized by an unjust relationship to evidence. I actually think that depression in White communities is caused by the alienation White people experience in sustaining their convoluted excuses for their racialized psychopathy.
So in order to cure White people of their psychopathy, you have to destabilize the institutions of Whiteness, e.g., churches, schools, families, employment relations. But most importantly, if Black life is to make sense, we cannot hesitate to think of White communities as markedly unhealthy and productive of psychopathy, borne by empirical markers that we have been habituated into ignoring.
The thing about psychopaths is that they often seem like nice people, unlike neurotics or psychotics. They can function in society, as normal people, and in fact, with the prevalence of White culture, they can shape society to sustain their psychopathy. But in order for Black problems to make sense, we need to stop pretending that White society doesn’t normalized and generate White psychopathy, and we need to stop the illusion that morality and reason — including the equal respect for persons — governs White behavior towards Black communities. In short, we need to stop pretending the White culture is healthy.
The question is how to convert people out of this psychopathy. It’s not going to be strictly by argument. That’s the thing about pathology: it’s resistant to argument. There is a way in which we need to commit White people and their institutions into a form of receivership, and since White psychopathy is sustained through institutions, the remedy is not to merely address individuals, it’s going to entail a change in institutional culture and the redistribution of power and control of material and productive resources, e.g., the stories Americans tell ourselves about ourselves, including the excuses we give ourselves about the reasons it is permissible to profit from treating Black communities like garbage.
Unfortunately, there is simply too much money in the therapy industry that is tied to the notion that institutions of Whiteness do not reproduce and sustain psychopathy.
One of the big institutional interventions on the horizon is destabilizing the notion that White psychopathy is primarily held together by White men, when the truth is the schools, churches, families and general institutions that normalize the production of White racial psychopaths — on the Left and the Right — are governed and policed by White women as well as White men.
But this is where therapy should begin: What sustains so many habits of thought and action that undermine your ability to treat people, including yourself, like a free and equal persons.
This is why trying to do therapy without a robust ethics training is like trying to be a surgeon, and studying disease, but guessing and not being bothered to work out what a healthy life and interrelations between bodily organs looks like.