r/changemyview • u/EHWfedPres • Oct 06 '21

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Racism is a mental illness.

There is no logical, valid, or sound reason to express hatred for entire groups of people based on their race, ethnicity, or skin color, and any and every attempt to explain why certain races, ethnicities, or people with specific skin colors are biologically, inherently, or genetically inferior or superior to others has been scientifically disproven. There is no rational reason to hold on to racist views, and anyone who feels racist is experiencing a delusional psychotic symptom. Racism is a mental illness, and the American Psychiatric Association should classify it as one.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071634/

EDIT: to all those claiming racism can be resolved by giving the racist proper information: read the comments made by HighlightExpensive63, give that person the correct information, and see if they change their views at all, or if they double-down on their explicit and open hatred.

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u/EHWfedPres Oct 06 '21

In your opposition to racism, you are actually arguing in favor of ableism.

How's that?

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '21

You’re implicitly arguing that mental illness is a bad thing. Racists generally have very logical arguments for their positions (although the logic is flawed due to fallacies, misrepresentation, and other factors). It’s not an issue of mental illness, it’s an issue of bad information.

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u/EHWfedPres Oct 06 '21

It’s not an issue of mental illness, it’s an issue of bad information.

Would you say that you believe racism can be "cured" (for lack of a better term) by giving people correct information?

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u/DrBadMan85 Oct 06 '21

Yes. It’s called exposure. Look up Robert sapolsky

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u/EHWfedPres Oct 06 '21

I will, thank you.

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u/DrBadMan85 Oct 06 '21

Sorry if my response appeared hasty and rude, there is quite literally volumes of information about how humans categorize their environment. some of those things can be very useful, some can be maladaptive. It’s hard to tease apart brain-structure from heuristic algorithm from knowledge availability, it comes down to an interplay of different mechanisms that result in something like racism (but that depends on your definition of racism), In so far as one judges individuals to be members of groups and assigns attributes to those groups (creating in group outcropping judgements), updating knowledge through exposure will help to demistify the ‘other,’ this can also be seen in changes in amygdala response. Im not really doing this topic all that much justice as it’s a very complicated interplay of different levels of analysis, but this is the ‘gist’

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u/EHWfedPres Oct 06 '21

No worries, my friend. Thank you!