Sitting across from a known racist at a family party or social event can make us uncomfortable. But chances are, that person isn’t going to go out and firebomb a black church or spray paint a swastika on a synagogue. It’s also easy to point the finger, but harder to consider our own words and actions and how they might be viewed by others. The Broadway musical Avenue Q points this out in their song, “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist.” And in fact, we may all indeed fall somewhere on the spectrum.
Though some take for granted that their “in” group is the best, there are others who completely reject any notion of prejudice, and yet display small forms of it, unwittingly. The point of the song, is that we all have presuppositions of others, be they subtle or outlandish, conscious or not, that may not be true. So run-of-the-mill racism isn’t considered a form of mental illness. But what about extreme racism?
While it isn’t in the DSM V—the manual containing all anointed psychiatric conditions, some experts believe that extreme racism should be. Oxford psychiatrists for instance did include “pathological bias” in their own version, the Oxford Handbook of Personality Disorders, last revised in 2012. Pathological bias is defined as extreme racist and supremacist views that could lead one to commit acts of violence against a person or persons of another race.
While Oxford psychiatrists regard extreme racism as a mental disorder, the APA thinks this designation may undermine personal responsibility.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) decided not to include extreme racism in the DSM V, also updated in 2012, because otherwise perfectly normal, law-abiding people in America might be implicated. The APA was also worried that if it classified racism, it would send the message that racists couldn’t control their beliefs, and so they would do little to change them.
Unfortunately, no biological causes of racism have been discovered, not for want of trying. Neuroscientists say our brain is wired to make us feel concerned or fearful toward anything in the environment that looks different. After all, over millennia, traditional hunter-gatherer societies had to worry about the raiding parties of other bands. Not only that, but thinking one’s own group superior may have aided social cohesion and survival.
Though we no longer live in such societies, we did for most of our existence on this planet. The fear of those who look, speak, or act different may be an epigenetic holdover from our ancient past. This was a survival mechanism that in the modern world became misconstrued as certain forms of prejudice.
Of course, there’s a difference between ignorance and hostile racism. Usually, experiences with different kinds of people can replace ignorance with understanding. But what about in extreme instances, such as the case of Dylann Roof, who in 2015, shot and killed nine parishioners at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina? Would his pathology have pushed him into violence, if his mind hadn’t been filled with vitriolic racism?
Most in the psychiatric community deny the idea that extreme racism in and of itself is a mental illness. But not all. Dr. Carl Bell of the University of Illinois is a psychiatry professor who believes that racism may be a disorder. He says 98% of racism is learned, but perhaps two percent may have something to do with some sort of personality deficiency. These people he gathers, project their problems onto a target, usually people from a different race. Paranoid disorder sufferers for instance might “project unacceptable feelings and ideas onto other people and groups.”
Memorial in the aftermath of the Charleston church shooting. Would mass shooters simply pick another target if racism was taken out of the equation?
Such racism is only considered pathological when it begins to interfere with a person’s day-to-day living. Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Poussaint has another point of view. The African-American scholar has been petitioning the APA since 1969 to include extreme racism in the DSM. He wrote in a 1999 New York Times article that, “Like all others who experience delusions, extreme racists do not think rationally.”
Though a debate that’s decade’s old, recent mass shootings and other tragic events have revived it, and launched a book. Historian Sander Gilman and sociologist James M. Thomas are the authors of, Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity. The authors promote the idea of personal responsibility. At the beginning of the 21st century they write, a conference in France gathered around the idea that fMRI scans may be able to pinpoint racism inside the brain. So far, no dice.
Another claim is that science can develop a pill for overcoming racism. No such drug is available, nor a target for one. Despite being a personal issue, more and more scholars, journalists, and even the general public, are considering extreme racism a pathology.
One reason might be that politicians often link cases such as the Charleston shooting with mental illness. This has entered our national psyche. So much so that in 2005, California’s Department of Corrections was found treating some forms of racism with antipsychotic drugs, according to The Washington Post.
Though extreme racism is alive and well, a lack of tolerance among the greater society may see it end.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Stone says that out of the 235 mass murder cases he’s studied, 22% of the perpetrators suffered from clinical mental illness. The rest were extreme narcissists or suffered from paranoid personality disorder. It’s likely that if it wasn’t racism that set such a person off, another target would preoccupy their minds, leading to an incident of carnage. Most of these perpetrators, all men, wrestle with “murderous rage, utter hopelessness, and suicidal despair,” Stone said.
If the aftermath of the 2016 election taught us anything, it’s that racism is still out there. But those who are overtly racist are becoming far more isolated and looked down upon by wider society. Racism itself may be with us for some time to come, but extreme racism won’t be tolerated, as the large number of protests attended by multitudes, in the aftermath of the hate crimes following the election, illustrated.
This intolerance for hate may call more violent extremists out of the woodwork periodically to do terrible, heartbreaking acts. Hopefully, these are the death shakes of an ideology that is enduring its final hours. Extreme racism’s demonization by our culture will ultimately bring it to an end. But wider prejudices and systemic ones don’t seem to be going anywhere, at least for the immediate future.
To learn more about the scientific basis of racism, click here:
Mario kart on giant screens
Poverty can be a self-sustaining cycle that might require an external influence to break it. A new paper published in Nature Sustainability and written by professor Andrew Bell of Boston University suggests that we could improve global anti-poverty and economic development systems by turning to an idea in a video game about a race car-driving Italian plumber.
A primer on Mario Kart
For those who have not played it, Mario Kart is a racing game starring Super Mario and other characters from the video game franchise that bears his name. Players race around tracks collecting power-ups that can directly help them, such as mushrooms that speed up their karts, or slow down other players, such as heat-seeking turtle shells that momentarily crash other karts.
The game is well known for having a mechanism known as "rubber-banding." Racers in the front of the pack get wimpy power-ups, like banana peels to slip up other karts, while those toward the back get stronger ones, like golden mushrooms that provide extra long speed boosts. The effect of this is that those in the back are pushed towards the center, and those in front don't get any boosts that would make catching them impossible.
If you're in last, you might get the help you need to make a last-minute break for the lead. If you're in first, you have to be on the lookout for these breakouts (and the ever-dreaded blue shells). The game remains competitive and fun.
Rubber-banding: A moral and economic lesson from Mario Kart
In the real world, we see rubber-banding used all the time. Welfare systems tend to provide more aid to those who need it than those who do not. Many of them are financed by progressive taxation, which is heavier on the well-off than the down-and-out. Some research suggests that these do work, as countries with lower levels of income inequality have higher social mobility levels.
It is a little more difficult to use rubber-banding in real life than in a video game, of course. While in the game, it is easy to decide who is doing well and who is not, things can be a little more muddled in reality. Furthermore, while those in a racing game are necessarily antagonistic to each other, real systems often strive to improve conditions for everybody or to reach common goals.
As Bell points out, rubber-banding can also be used to encourage sustainable, growth programs that help the poor other than welfare. They point out projects such as irrigation systems in Pakistan or Payments for Ecosystems Services (PES) schemes in Malawi, which utilize positive feedback loops to both provide aid to the poor and promote stable systems that benefit everyone.
In the Malawi case, farmers were paid to practice conservation agriculture to reduce the amount of sediment from their farms flowing into a river. This immediately benefits hydroelectric producers and their customers but also provides real benefits to farmers in the long run as their soil doesn't erode. By providing an incentive to the farmers to conserve the soil, a virtuous cycle of conservation, soil improvement, and improved yields can begin.
While this loop differs from the rubber-banding in Mario, the game's approach can help illustrate the benefits of rubber-banding in achieving a more equitable world.
The task now, as Bell says in his paper, is to look at problems that exist and find out "what the golden mushroom might be."
Volcano erupting lava, volcanic sky active rock night Ecuador landscape
How can modern technology help warn us of impending volcanic eruptions?
One promising answer may lie in satellite imagery. In a recent study published in Nature Geoscience, researchers used infrared data collected by NASA satellites to study the conditions near volcanoes in the months and years before they erupted.
The results revealed a pattern: Prior to eruptions, an unusually large amount of heat had been escaping through soil near volcanoes. This diffusion of subterranean heat — which is a byproduct of "large-scale thermal unrest" — could potentially represent a warning sign of future eruptions.
For the study, the researchers conducted a statistical analysis of changes in surface temperature near volcanoes, using data collected over 16.5 years by NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. The results showed that eruptions tended to occur around the time when surface temperatures near the volcanoes peaked.
Eruptions were preceded by "subtle but significant long-term (years), large-scale (tens of square kilometres) increases in their radiant heat flux (up to ~1 °C in median radiant temperature)," the researchers wrote. After eruptions, surface temperatures reliably decreased, though the cool-down period took longer for bigger eruptions.
"Volcanoes can experience thermal unrest for several years before eruption," the researchers wrote. "This thermal unrest is dominated by a large-scale phenomenon operating over extensive areas of volcanic edifices, can be an early indicator of volcanic reactivation, can increase prior to different types of eruption and can be tracked through a statistical analysis of little-processed (that is, radiance or radiant temperature) satellite-based remote sensing data with high temporal resolution."
Although using satellites to monitor thermal unrest wouldn't enable scientists to make hyper-specific eruption predictions (like predicting the exact day), it could significantly improve prediction efforts. Seismologists and volcanologists currently use a range of techniques to forecast eruptions, including monitoring for gas emissions, ground deformation, and changes to nearby water channels, to name a few.
Still, none of these techniques have proven completely reliable, both because of the science and the practical barriers (e.g. funding) standing in the way of large-scale monitoring. In 2014, for example, Japan's Mount Ontake suddenly erupted, killing 63 people. It was the nation's deadliest eruption in nearly a century.
In the study, the researchers found that surface temperatures near Mount Ontake had been increasing in the two years prior to the eruption. To date, no other monitoring method has detected "well-defined" warning signs for the 2014 disaster, the researchers noted.
The researchers hope satellite-based infrared monitoring techniques, combined with existing methods, can improve prediction efforts for volcanic eruptions. Volcanic eruptions have killed about 2,000 people since 2000.
"Our findings can open new horizons to better constrain magma–hydrothermal interaction processes, especially when integrated with other datasets, allowing us to explore the thermal budget of volcanoes and anticipate eruptions that are very difficult to forecast through other geophysical/geochemical methods."
