I received a statement today from Camille Cosby, wife of Bill Cosby, about the Capitol rioters from last week.
Mrs. Cosby refers in her statement to a 1999 op-ed piece in the New York Times by the esteemed Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, that racism is a mental illness. I agree with Dr. Poussaint, a long time associate and friend of Mrs. Cosby’s currently incarcerated husband. I am giving the link here to his essay.
Mrs. Cosby takes Dr. Poussaint’s essay a little further. I’ve sent the respected educator an email asking him what he thinks of her interpretation. I’ll add it here with an update if he responds.
Here’s Mrs. Cosby’s statement. I’ve split it into sections just to make it easier to read on this page:
Hatred is a hellish emotion. In recent years, hatred has been spewed by well known, public, demonic people…and condoned, sensationalized and disseminated by varied forms of irresponsible, greedy media. Racism is in the forefront of multiple types of hatred. Racism has been and is steeped in the foundation of America’s generational histories; ever since white people’s original settlements in this country.
Openly, specific white people committed brutal and murderous seizures of the homelands of indigenous people; savagely enslaved millions of Africans; and, afterwards, legalized numerous years of apartheid within our nation’s medical, financial, corporate, law enforcement, judicial, governmental and educational institutions…all of which are still hugely, racially problematic.
Evidently, those particular white people delusively and dementedly felt and believed that their male and female whiteness gave them lifelong entitlements and supremacy. Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint’s profound and timeless article, “They Hate. They Kill. Are They Insane?”, was originally printed as an opinion piece in the New York Times on August 26, 1999.
Dr. Poussaint was not then supported by his peers in the profession of psychiatry; probably because legions of psychiatrists have professional and personal histories of racism….but, each and every word in the article should resonate to clear-minded readers, in light of the recent in-your -face acts of racism that are sadly and grossly very familiar in the USA. The convergence of crazed mobs of white people, hell-bent on destructions and murders in African-American communities, have been all too common occurrences in this country.
This is a country that has not cleaned up its act pertaining to racial hatred. That should be a primary mandate amongst diverse white people and they should not look to people of color to resolve that ongoing, sociological filth of injustice. Is America a democracy? Not yet, nor has it ever been…maybe soon. Â
