What Most People Fail to Understand about White Pathology
There's nothing logical or rational about White pathology; it's a social disease.
Jerome C. Crichton, DMin., PhD
9/21/20264 min read
There’s not a day that passes when White pathology is not on full display. White pathology is a socialized reflex fueled by twisted assumptions about Black people in particular and non-White people in general that have been handily passed down across the generations as social norms. It is inherently racist and inherently self-destructive, but it provides a fictive sense of the White self and the White-aligned self that supports an identity deficit marked by diminishing the humanity of others. The common mistake is to treat it as conscious hatred or individual prejudice, and while it may express itself as both, it is more accurately a socialized reflex.
In short, by promoting the idea that to be Black is to be inferior—and while this applies to other populations, my concern in this post concerns Black people—White people, as a societal whole, feel better about themselves. This requires neither full participation nor consent; it is the fabric of a socially dysfunctional society in which fantasy operates at an unconscious level as a corollary of White privilege.
Two incidents in the past weeks serve as jarring reminders for some and business as usual for others. The first was the doxxing of the Black juror in the Lindsay Clancy case in Plymouth, MA. The media and its allegedly associated bloggers appeared to collude to discredit the lone holdout. The incident brings to mind the words of Denzel Washington in the Spike Lee joint, Malcolm X: “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us!” The piling on the lone holdout juror was exactly that—Plymouth Rock landing on us. It was a temper tantrum, not a genuine question of law. The mind-shaping media pulled out all of the stops to castigate and vilify the one juror with a conscience because the actions of lone Black, Haitian immigrant did not align with their warped ideology.
In the second incident, Converse, the subsidiary of Nike, put out a degenerate advertisement, which essentially celebrates the slaughter of Black people through lynching. The unmistakable KKK hood served as a reminder of the sadism and sexual deviance that brought White people together for social events and became the content of postcards featuring the dismembered remains of Black bodies. The ad evokes the same visual vocabulary of racial terror that White pathology normalizes.
These incidents are not aberrations; they are symptoms. That is why the language of pathology fits. White pathology is insidious! And to think, they barely sparked any outrage from those who falsely claim that we are living in a post-racial, color-blind America. The relative absence of condemnation from White voices, especially the voices of those in power, is a fitting reminder that if you ever thought that racism and White pathology are in any sense rational, you missed the memo.
Major Black thinkers from 1619 onward have described White behavior and attitudes as pathological, whether or not they used those exact words. They realized that the attitudes and behaviors that have historically sought to elevate White people, while diminishing others, are in fact a disease, that is, a pathology.
Medical pathologies examine diseases that create dysfunction in the human body; social pathology looks at systemic malfunctions that harm groups of people. To address these systemic malfunctions, we’ve got to get away from treating this contagion as if there is any inherent logic or rationality to it. It is a sickness that has taken on a life of its own. The daily microaggressions and intermittent public acts of hostility toward Black people are, in a perverse sense, cries for help. This is not an excuse that removes moral and ethical culpability; rather, it is a diagnosis that demands accountability. Like an alcoholic who hides bottles, the system reproduces harm even as it denies it. If the racist Plymouth media could have helped themselves, they would have. If Converse/Nike could have helped itself, it would have. But they can’t! They can no more help themselves than Donald Trump can help himself.
The nature of the pathology is such that even the most liberal and egalitarian White people are socialized to assume—consciously or unconsciously—White superiority. The continual reinforcement of almost every system and structure of society has driven the myth of racial superiority deep into the psyche of many people. The manifestations differ from person to person and range along two axes: intensity, from mild to extreme, and visibility, from covert to overt. It means that even the best and noblest of intentions alone are doomed because they are sullied by generational cycles of aberrant socialization. Ultimately, only resocialization can interrupt the cycle to offer any meaningful hope.
Because the pathology is transmitted through narrative and norm, resocialization must begin with young children and with the history they are taught in order to shift away from the underlying fantasies of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism to the unvarnished truth of the racist and inhumane ideologies that underlie the status quo. All children must be taught American history and not the fictional narratives of White history that deflect, deny, divert, distort, destroy, and dehumanize.
Clearly, this is a tall order for a society hell-bent on self-destruction and socialized to disrespect Black people. But self-destruction is exactly the cost of a pathology that has taken on a life of its own: it consumes the very society that clings to it by eating away the vestiges of its hollowed-out soul. The doxxing in Plymouth and the Converse ad are not outliers; they are symptoms of a socialized reflex that exposes the pathology while normalizing Black suffering. Naming it as a pathology does not excuse it—it explains why accountability and resocialization are inseparable. The only way out is to teach children an honest American history, one that refuses the fantasies of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism and tells the truth about the ideologies that built the status quo. Until that truth becomes the norm and White people collectively see it as a strength from which to harvest a new generation rather than a weakness from which to run, the dis-ease will simply metastasize and ruin any future hope of racial and social habilitation. Left with a vacuity of soul, their epitaph will read, “That which we have feared most has come upon us!”
