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Lighting The Fires Of Racism
By Jan Eastgate President, Citizens Commission on Human Rights International
Do we have racism problems today?
In the U.S., African American and Hispanic children in majorly white school districts are classified as learning disabled much more often than whites. In this way, millions of minority children are being hooked onto prescribed mind-altering drugs to treat their mental disorder. And yet, with early reading instruction, the number of students so classified could be reduced by up to 70%.1
In the U.S. today also, the African American and Hispanic races are also significantly over-represented in prisons.
Meanwhile in Britain, black men are 10 times more likely than white males to be diagnosed as schizophrenic, and more likely to be prescribed and given higher doses of powerful psychotropic drugs.2 They are also more likely to receive electroshock and to be subject to restraints.3
We do indeed have racism today, with various minority groups continuing to come under assault from one quarter or another. The effects are obvious: poverty, broken families, ruined youth and even genocide. And no matter how loud the pleadings or sincere the efforts of our religious leaders, our politicians and our teachers, racism persists.
But why? This is obviously one question that has not yet been satisfactorily answered. In fact, beware any answers that are being propagated, because racism not only still exists, it is getting rapidly worse.
However, rather than struggle with the apparent complexity of the answer to this question, there is a far simpler, more penetrating and revealing question to be asked.
Who?
And here the truth is very simple. We make no headway, and in fact regress on the matter of racism, largely because two unsuspected groups actively, yet covertly foster racism throughout the world.
In 2001, Dr. Karen Wren and Professor Paul Boyle of the University of St. Andrews, Sweden, concluded that the role of scientific racism in psychiatry throughout Europe has not only been well established historically, it persists today.4
In 1983, a World Health Organization report stated, in no other medical field in South Africa is the contempt of the person, cultivated by racism, more concisely portrayed than in psychiatry.5
Psychiatry comes closest to the policein pursuing practices and procedures that discriminate against minority ethnic groups in the United Kingdom, said Dr. S.P. Sashidharan, professor of community psychiatry, in 1999.6
Isaac Hayes, Academy Award-winning composer, musician, actor, and a Commissioner of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, says: Psychiatric programs and drugs have ravaged our inner cities, helping to create criminals out of our young people, and all because psychiatrists and psychologists were allowed to study behavior in our schools instead of leaving teachers to just teach.
While actively lighting the fires of racism internationally today, both psychiatry and psychology also have a racist pedigree that has drastically influenced the course of history itself.
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