“Racial anxiety” refers to the heightened levels of stress and emotion that we confront when interacting with people of other races. People of color experience concern that they will be the subject of discrimination and hostility. White people, meanwhile, worry that they will be assumed to be racist. Studies have show that interracial interaction can cause physical symptoms of anxiety and that our non-verbal behaviors—making eye contact, using welcoming gestures or a pleasant tone of voice, for example—can be affected as well. When everyone in a conversation is anxious that it will turn negative, it often does. This causes a kind of feedback loop where the fears and anxieties of both white people and people of color are confirmed by their everyday interactions.
White economic insecurity in the face of a browning nation is part of White racial anxiety
Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon suggests having too many Asian tech CEOs undermines ‘civic society’
“When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” he didn’t finish his sentence. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
Suck it up!you cry baby.
South Asians rock !
This is like the Britishers crying about cricket!
T] he practitioners of psychoanalysis are almost categorically all white, and its analytical models disregard the effects of racial differences on the lived experiences of the analysts and analysands. . . . African American scholars have been so hesitant in embracing psychoanalysis. For once African Americans recognize that psychoanalysis always seems to boil down to sexual matters to the exclusion of race matters, psychoanalysis appears to ally itself as much or more with the forces of white privilege than with those of racial equality.
Freud [by identifying himself with the lion] has established (however unconsciously) an equation between the analyst/patient relationship and the most brutal form of the master / slave relationship, in which the slave is only a piece of meat to satisfy the master's ravenous appetite (for power, money, sex, aggression, or whatever). Freud's joke thus reveals an imbalance of power intrinsic to the analytic relationship that in many ways puts the patient at the mercy of the analyst, just as the slave is at the mercy of the master.
First of all, we have to redefine mental illness. Many forms of human distress and misbehaviour, seen through Western eyes as 'illness', are not medicalized in other cultures. Eastern psychotherapies, for example, deal with contemplative awareness; 'neurosis' can be a path to enlightenment for a Buddhist.
Much of Western psychotherapy is currently directed towards problem-solving or decision-making, reflecting the value given to personal self-sufficiency and the control of events by Western culture. In Western thinking an illness is generated by causes arising from biological or psychological change.
In older cultures all changes are seen as relative - as in the thinking of modern physics. And it is just possible that Western ideas in psychiatry could be incorporated into a relativity model. Biochemical and genetic influences might come to be better understood in dynamic balance or imbalance with each other, and with others - social, cultural, spiritual and cosmological.
The second thing we have to do is restructure the way we organize mental health care. The World Health Organization (WHO) spreads the gospel according to Western psychiatry. The ethos of psychiatry suits the marketing of Western drugs and fails to address racism. So, rightly or wrongly, one gets the impression that the WHO itself is condoning racism and is dominated by Western economic interests. This alliance must be broken.
The final vision is of a world in which the concept of illness would remain but would not be fixed in firm categories assumed to be universal. Mental health is not unlike happiness or sorrow, which are relative rather than absolute. There would be diversity within unity.
Different cultures should be understood as different paths towards the same basic goal - that of living together in peace, in communion with one another and our environment. Mental health is different because of culture and race yet the same irrespective of either. That is a paradox - but it is also the reality.
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