Racism is Not Mental Illness

A brief argument.

See this.  That Counter-Currents essay is fine as far as it goes (*), but I would like to make two brief further arguments against the latest politicized fad (**) of attempting to equate “racism” with “mental illness.” I make the arguments of (1) adaptive fitness and (2) universalism.

1. Adaptive fitness. The essence of what is traditionally considered “racism” – preference for one’s racial ingroup and hostility to racial outgroups when those outgroups are in competition with the ingroup – is quite obviously adaptive behavior, given the greater genetic similarity of ingroup vs. outgroup (***). Further, “racism” can produce mutually beneficial networks of “ethnic nepotism” among ingroup members, as well as the production and maintenance of a culture congenial to the ingroup, both of which boosts the biological fitness of the ingroup compared to outgroups.  

To label adaptive behavior “pathological” is objectively an oxymoron. Indeed, labeling a group’s adaptive behavior as “pathological” is an act of aggression against that group – serving someone else’s adaptive interests – and, ironically, can itself be considered “racism” against the group so targeted.

See this for more about the genetic interests involved. “Racism” can prevent ingroup genocide, it can prevent the dispossession and displacement of one’s people, and benefit each member of the group whose individual interests are protected by the “racism” that benefits the whole.

2. Universalism. The same standards of mental health vs. mental illness should apply to all peoples, especially if we are to accept the “non-racist” universalism of the System/Left. Then how to explain that the same behaviors that are labeled “pathological racism” in Whites are labeled as “healthy expressions of identity,” “enlightened self-interest,” and/or “justifiable group defense” when applied to non-Whites? How and why is “mental illness” contingent upon the racial identity of those diagnosed?

No doubt the System/Left will trot out their typical sophistry attempting to explain why only Whites can be racist, but this simply exposes their particularism and rejection of Universalist truths – in fact, a rejection of the “anti-racism” they wish to impose specifically and only on White behavior.

When any behavior – much less adaptive behavior! – is labeled as mental illness in one group but labeled as healthy expression in another group, alarm bells should go off. And when that behavior is indeed adaptive, the uneven labeling reflects nothing more or less than a thinly disguised attack on the group whose adaptive behavior is hypocritically pathologized and unfairly stigmatized.

If the System/Left wants to be exercise particularism, rather than universalism, on this subject, in opposition to their oft-stated alleged fundamental Universalist beliefs, then they expose both their hypocrisy and their anti-White animus. If Whites are “special” in the negative sense in that only their “racism” is a symptom of “mental illness,” then why shouldn’t pro-Whites adopt a positive particularism in defense of their race?  

Particularism is inexorably linked to “racism” – thus, if the System/Left supports particularism, then this gives moral legitimacy to “racism,” and if they fall back on universalism, then their attacks against a specifically White form of “racism” is hypocritical and illegitimate.  

Note that my arguments can also be turned around to support the idea (asserted in the Counter-Currents article) that xenophilia is true mental illness, as xenophilia  works against adaptive fitness; further, the (Universalist) human norm is to be ethnocentric, which, to the System/Left, is acceptable and healthy for all groups except Whites.

Notes:

*However, given that Greg Johnson is in the habit of ascribing “insanity” to his critics, that essay is hypocritical.

**That homosexuality was first a mental illness and then not, purely on the basis of sociopolitical trends, indicates the biases involved, which the Counter-Currents essay rightfully mentions.

***When individuals use the “relative finder” function of whatever personal genetic ancestry test that they have taken – a reasonably objective feature of such tests as it compares genetic kinship (similarity) between different customers – what do they find?  Almost always they find matches to people from the same race as them, many deriving from the same or similar ethnic ancestry.  And why not?  Race and ethnicity are akin to large scale extended families, and ethnic nepotism is just a broader and more diluted version of familial nepotism – with the adaptive value of the broadness (the numbers involved) more than compensating (by several orders of magnitude) the dilution of the relatedness.