The Obama Years: The Beginning of the End

Racism as Mental Illness

White supremacy was once said to be a mental illness of some type, for which scientific researchers were actually looking for a cure of some kind, in the form of a pill or a shot.

It’s an easy out, medication as salvo and cure-all. President Obama’s presence “so the world may know” doesn’t lend a hand to an easy out like “It’s a sickness, I can’t help it.”

If we excuse racism by saying that it’s a mental illness of some unnamed sort, it means those who do it can’t help it, and that only exonerates them from responsibility for their own actions.

Black people cannot help being psychologically and emotionally impacted by the effects of racism, but it is highly doubtful that any white person like a Paula Deen or Michael Richards type, or even the Bill O’Reilly’s or Rush Limbaugh’s — can’t live their lives without being racists. They most assuredly can, but it pays for them to do so; and for those who make a profit from it, they can use money as justification to indulge. However, they can never use mental illness as an excuse for it.

For those who do not get paid to do it, it is something to behold to watch them fixate and obsess on other people because of their race or perceived race or ethnicity. They apparently don’t have a life of their own to shyt on without shytting on someone else’s, just for the hell of it.

Then there are Black people who “act white” by absorbing and gestating white people’s ways of summing up other races and ethnic origins of people. Black folk who actually participate in spreading the white supremacy disease of racism by assuming things about other people that they should not assume.

It is a scandal and a shame to watch how easily and viciously that outright racism has layered itself and taken a toll on the whole lot of American society by spreading itself like cancer into so many human lives. There are Black people who believe that they have graduated beyond being “Negroes” of the worst fashion, the snooty kind, and believe they are above it all when they really are not. Sooner or later, some event in life at the hands of those who can control it is going to collide with the lives of those who cannot and that “3 AM Negro Wakeup Call” is coming.

There are Black people who make white supremacist assumptions about nearly every Mexican or Vietnamese or Korean person like whites make assumptions about Black people when nothing in this life is ever that cut’n’dried.

For instance, a Black person can move into a nice Mexican neighborhood or a nice Korean neighborhood just like whites can find a nice Black neighborhood to live in if that is where they prefer to be.

Here’s where the plot thickens: if whites move into a Black neighborhood, there may be some chance -due to inherent white supremacy- of a Black person leaving and thinking the neighborhood is going “down the tubes” because a white person moved in, but there isn’t much of a chance of that happening. Black flight is more likely to happen when more affluent or elitist Black people are trying to get away from other poorer class Blacks than they would flight out if a poorer class white person moved in. However, if one or two Black families move into a white neighborhood, white flight is almost guaranteed.

Another for instance: There are Black people who have no problem with gentrification, or the removal of Black people from homes and neighborhoods that they were likely born in and have lived in all of their lives (because they “don’t take care of it anyway”). Sounds Mighty White Superior, wouldn’t you say?

It’s okay to push them out of house and home and tell the white folks to come on in and take over and make them homeless or scattered and dispersed because of the way they live, which they don’t seem to be having a problem with. If they cared about it, they’d do something about it. However, that doesn’t automatically justify telling white people it’s okay to push Black folk out of their homes and off that land, or out of their own ‘hoods because of it.

It must be awfully nice to look through those rose-colored glasses at people of your own race and ethnicity and say the same thing about them that white people do. Black folks looking through that all-exclusive pair of “white vision” goggles is a sight to behold.

This is where the cold facts come into play about what should be a DSM-VI mental health diagnosis called PTSS – post-traumatic slave syndrome.

Another example is the impact of racism on Black people in such a way that they deny their Black features when it’s pretty obvious that even if they don’t have flared nostrils that will hold dinosaur bones, or big round lips that hold small saucers and are often called “soup coolers,” that doesn’t mean that don’t have Black features. No matter how light-complected and good-haired, most people can tell by looking that someone has classically Afrocentric facial features, even if they tend more toward Eurocentric than African.

Self-hatred is a hell of a thing, and because of white supremacy, too Black people have plenty of it.

***

On the surface, white supremacy appears to be totally deranged.

It leads to feelings of depression in Black people, as well as suicidal thoughts, loss of self-esteem, self-harm, self-hate, and maltreatment of other Black people, as well as a whole range of other actual well-defined mental health diagnoses and maladies in the Black community.

It can and often does lead straight to mental illness in Black people, some of whom have plenty of money to try to surgically remove themselves from it. The most publicly known figures to date have been celebrities like Michael Jackson who was in denial about it; celebs like Beyonce, Nicki Minaj, Wendy Williams, and TI’s wife, Tiny, as well as numerous others.

White supremacy, in its use of the blackface caricature, the costumes, the ignorant statements and gestures, the “monkey” complex that is the mark of their own ancestors in the cavesides of the Caucasus Mountains; the Aunt Jemimas and Uncle Rastuses, the television shows that only took Black prostitutes, pimps and criminals out of the Red Light District and put them in surburbia and the White House … the nappy-headed connotations, the “Hit-and-Run” racist apologists, the treatment in courtrooms, the variances of treatment when Black people are the victims of the crimes of whites and/or other Black people, all of it — even the nasty vicious racism that was tossed at President Obama on the left and the right by some of the most high-profile media moguls in the business.

Obama may or may not have seen the nastiness of the racism that we “little people” deal with on a daily basis for the first time in his life, but one thing is certain above all else … no matter how much he tries to look away from it and avoid calling it what it was, there is no being in denial about it for us. Not for those of us who live with it nearly every day of our lives.

The terrorism of racism in America, the long-term internalized abuse that we turned against one another, the use and leverage of white supremacy as a completed act is one of the biggest explanations for the hurt, harm, confusion, maladjustment, fear, and in some rare cases, even the paranoia that is a direct result of Black people absorbing white supremacy into their/our lives. In short, their issues have become ours and it has caused more damage than a little bit to our psyches, or stances, our skills and abilities, and even damage to the way we interact with one another at times.

As a final note, one place we cab always go for a complete study in white supremacy is social media sites.

The watchers who think they are watching us are also being watched and studied to see if there is some type of justifiable mental heath malady going on with them.

To date, volumes of books can be written about “white Blackface behavior” and the fake social media profiles that they come up with just to follow Black people around many sites. They do it just to incite, distract, inflame, stalk, and harass the Communities with stereotypical rhetoric that speaks more to their own behaviors than it ever will ours.

Many do it because it is a “Hunger Games” kind of fun to them to see how may actual real Black people they can get to play both sides against the middle, others do it because there are political parties who specialize in inciting riots between Black people by pitching in bullshit to cause mistrust and disharmony that has an effect on keeping us separated and powerless to do anything to change our economic and political standing in America.

The ones who do it simply have too much time and money on their hands and are actually that obsessed and fixated on Black people for reasons that we may never know. However, they do it and quite a few have been tossed under a virtual bus after being caught. Their speech and online mannerisms after often a dead giveaway. Black people know one another too well not to be able to tell when a white person is in the room, even when they are pretending to be Black. It isn’t hard to smoke them out if it really is a Black person being put on to it by white people just for fun and games.

The bottom line is that although racism is not a mental health issue, it can and does cause many mental health issues in Black people across the board, around the world. But, we also doubt seriously that most racists would take the cure if there was one to be had.

A racist mentality is not an abnormality of the brain, where only initiating thoughts are triggered that do not have to be acted upon … it is an anomaly of the heart, where desires and actions start to take shape and are brought to life, and where they actually seize a life-threatening chokehold on the desires and actions, and even the attitudes, of others who have had the misfortune, only in the mind of a racist, to be born the wrong skin color.

—PART 3—

The Horse, Hunter and Stag

  A quarrel had arisen between the Horse and the Stag, so the
Horse came to a Hunter to ask his help to take revenge on the
Stag.  The Hunter agreed, but said: "If you desire to conquer the
Stag, you must permit me to place this piece of iron between your
jaws, so that I may guide you with these reins, and allow this
saddle to be placed upon your back so that I may keep steady upon
you as we follow after the enemy."  The Horse agreed to the
conditions, and the Hunter soon saddled and bridled him.  Then
with the aid of the Hunter the Horse soon overcame the Stag, and
said to the Hunter: "Now, get off, and remove those things from my
mouth and back."

  "Not so fast, friend," said the Hunter.  "I have now got you
under bit and spur, and prefer to keep you as you are at present."

	If you allow men to use you for your own purposes,
	they will use you for theirs.