Recentering White Racism in How We Discuss 'The Psychology of Hate'

How do individuals and groups rationalize discrimination and hatred? 

Salon's new essay "The Psychology of Hate"--which is actually an excerpt from the brilliant Nicholas Epley's book Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want--offers some preliminary sketches of how those processes take place.

To point. The following example details how American law constructed various categories and types of human beings, where some had legal rights, and others were denied them:

Carrying his son’s bones in a bag clutched to his chest, Standing Bear and twenty-seven others began their return in the dead of winter. Word spread of the group’s travel as they approached the Omaha Indian reservation, midway through their journey. The Omahas welcomed them with open arms, but U.S. officials welcomed them with open handcuffs. General George Crook was ordered by government officials to return the beleaguered Poncas to the Indian Territory.

Crook couldn’t bear the thought. “I’ve been forced many times by orders from Washington to do most inhuman things in dealings with the Indians,” he said, “but now I’m ordered to do a more cruel thing than ever before.” Crook was an honorable man who could no more disobey direct orders than he could fly, so instead he stalled, encouraging a newspaper editor from Omaha to enlist lawyers who would then sue General Crook (as the U.S. government’s representative) on Standing Bear’s behalf. The suit? To have the U.S. government recognize Standing Bear as a person, as a human being...

Standing Bear was a man intelligent enough to lead his tribe along a six-hundred-mile journey in the dead of winter and back again, a man who felt love so deeply that he carried his son’s bones around his neck to fulfill a promise. Yet he found himself pleading with people from far-off places who had failed almost completely to see his mind and instead viewed him as a piece of mindless property. Facing those unable to recognize a sentient mind before their eyes, Standing Bear had been forced to show his to them.

Salon's feature on Mindwise has accomplished its goal: I want to buy the book because it appears to be a compelling and important text that offers readers some keen insights on the worst aspects of human nature. 

However, the Psychology of Hate does not contain any of the following words: racism, race, ethnocentrism, whiteness, or white supremacy. 

Racism is a modern invention which legitimated Colonialism and Imperialism while providing the philosophical, ethical, moral, religious, economic, political, and social framework for the various types of "othering" which Nicholas Epley's excerpted piece describes with such skill. 

Thus, Psychology of Hate's omission of such a basic concept as "racism" is glaring and odd.

Many things change from the draft to the final work. And the final book most likely contains a thorough working through of how race and racism are central to how arbitrary categories of human difference based on skin color or other perceived differences are made salient and real by society and individuals. 

Nevertheless, we are left to engage the work as offered on Salon for what it is.

One of the major challenges in talking about race in the post civil rights era is how many white folks, and some people of color, have internalized a color blind racial frame that limits and blinds our ability to deal with white supremacy as one of the dominant social facts in American life. We talk around race but do not explicitly engage it. In the most absurd examples, identifying and challenging white racism and white supremacy is taken to be more offensive than the moral and ethically unjust outcomes and processes that such ideologies sustain.

Psychology of Hate contains several moments where the omission of race is distracting. 

But perhaps that is a function which results from the particular challenge of writing about the psychology of hate in a post racial age, a moment when the consensus bargain is one where all human beings must be equally implicated--as opposed to risking how a mention of white racism as a specific and real fact may cause upset for some white readers.

Some examples from Psychology of Hate.

On pain:

Even doctors—those whose business is to treat others humanely— can remain disengaged from the minds of their patients, particularly when those patients are easily seen as different from the doctors themselves. Until the early 1990s, for instance, it was routine practice for infants to undergo surgery without anesthesia. Why? Because at the time, doctors did not believe that infants were able to experience pain, a fundamental capacity of the human mind. “How often we used to be reassured by more senior physicians that newborn infants cannot feel pain,” Dr. Mary Ellen Avery writes in the opening of “Pain in Neonates".

Research has demonstrated that doctors and other caregivers consistently under-estimate how blacks feel and experience pain. Research has also documented how blacks and Latinos are given less pain medication than whites. African-American children are made to suffer by doctors who are either unable or unwilling to sense the former's pain. 

American medicine has quite accurately been described as a type of "Medical Apartheid" in which people of color (and the poor) have been subjected to experiments, wanton cruelty under the guise of "helping", and receive consistently worse quality medical care than whites.

Of people "like us and them":

Some videos showed people getting poked in the foot, others in the hand, and others in the lips. These are painful to watch, I promise, at least if you’re not a physician. Nonphysicians who watched these videos had the same reaction I do, with the neural regions that are active when actually experiencing physical pain first-hand also being active when watching other people experiencing pain. It quite literally hurts to watch someone else being hurt. The physicians, however, showed virtually no response in these physical pain regions at all. Instead, the physicians showed activity in a very different part of the brain, most notably a relatively small spot in their medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). This spot is located about one inch above and behind the inside part of your eyebrows, on each side of your brain. For the good of your social life, try not to get injured there.

This neural activity is important because it tells us something critical about how people think about one another. Those who are close to us are considered mindful human beings, “like me.” As people become more and more different from us, or more distant from our immediate social networks, they become less and less likely to engage our MPFC. When we don’t engage this region, others appear relatively mindless, something less than fully human.

Research has demonstrated that people feel more sympathy for in-group members suffering pain than out-group members. Other work has found that African-Americans show more empathy for members of their own racial group who are in distress than do whites in a parallel situation.

In one of the most disturbing experiments for what it suggests about inter-group empathy and hate, there is evidence that white people's brains, especially those who measure high in "subtle racism", quite literally do not "see" non-whites.

Regarding how an empathy gap can impact public policy:

You don’t need to look deep into a person’s brain to see the consequences of failing to engage your MPFC. You can hear it in the impressions people share about the minds of others. In calling for welfare reform in 2010, for instance, South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, André Bauer, likened the poor to “stray animals” whose government assistance should be curtailed. “You know why?” he said. “Because they breed. . . . They will reproduce, especially ones who don’t think much further than that. . . . They don’t know any better.” Bauer’s sixth sense appears to have been disengaged, as is true for many people when they think about the poor, the homeless, the most disadvantaged and distant of social groups. Distance—a sense of dissimilarity, of difference, of otherness—can keep your MPFC uninvolved, leaving you to think about other human beings as something less than fully human.

Race and gender are central to how the poverty discourse in the post civil rights era has been framed by conservatives and the mainstream news media. In the present, the Right-wing's effort to enlist the support of the white working class to kill the "useless eaters" is almost wholly dependent on White identity politics and a belief--contrary to the facts--that people of color are siphoning off the "(white) American community's resources."

The most disadvantaged and distant of social groups is not an empty category. It has a history which is dominated by the color line.

Racism and white supremacy are central to Epley's claims in the Psychology of Hate. One of the biggest white lies in post racial America--and its accompanying Age of Austerity--is that we no longer need to discuss how racism and white supremacy structure life chances. This limits the public discourse for fear of hurting white folks' feelings and providing an easy target for protest and upset by the white conservatives.

Racism, hate, bigotry, and prejudice are acts committed by one group of people towards another where individuals are impacted--often lethally--by their perceived membership in, or distance from, a given community. 

In the United States and the West hate was not universal. Nor, were the crimes legitimated by it. 

White on black and brown racial violence has been the norm for the modern age. 

True progress will come from owning that fact as opposed to hiding from it because of some facile logic which suggests that "racism" is a universal human sin.