The insidious link between racism and depression
In June, Janet Jackson revealed to Essence magazine that she spent her 30s battling “intense” depression. Reflecting on those “difficult years,” the singer ticked off the forces behind her struggle: low self-esteem, failing to meet “impossibly high” standards and — “of course” — racism.
While depression can be triggered by several biological and environmental factors, the link between racism and depression “is undeniable,” Suzette Speight, a psychology professor at the University of Akron, tells The Post.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African-Americans are significantly more likely to report major depression than whites. Speight, who’s done extensive research on black mental health, says that study analyses “consistently find a link” between symptoms of depression and “experiences of racism.” Those span everything from race-based micro-aggressions — the subtle snubs people of color routinely face out in the world — to racially charged verbal harassment and physical assault.
trying to calm myself down. I was crying a lot and not functioning. I couldn’t get through things without going down this whole rabbit hole of, ‘You’re a piece of s–t.’”
Looking back, he says, the typical stresses of moving to a new city and establishing a career were compounded by racial anxiety.
Even in his best suit, Hardy and his dreadlocks stood out in Panama’s capital city, where less than 10 percent of the population is black. “I got questioned a lot,” he says. “It kept me constantly on edge — getting those looks, getting stopped by the police to show my passport papers.” That plus trying to do “too many things at once” pushed him over the edge: During a phone call with his parents, he confessed, “If I don’t leave, I’m probably going to kill myself.” Two weeks later, he was back stateside, on a therapist’s couch.
Hardy was lucky: He had a good support network, and landed a helpful counselor right away. But that’s not the norm for many African-Americans struggling with depression.
“There is still a large stigma related to mental-health conditions in the black community,” says Joy Harden Bradford, an Atlanta psychologist and the host of the “Therapy for Black Girls” podcast. She believes many depressed people of color suffer in silence because of that, and research backs her up: Multiple studies have found that African-Americans are less likely than whites to seek treatment for mental-health issues.
IT’S NOT SOCIALISM, IT’S RACISM
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
After the ’10 census, New York lost two congressional seats. Overpriced, lacking any growth industries except tourism and community organizing, the state just couldn’t keep up with the rest of the country.
New York had been bleeding congressional seats since the rise of the suburbs. After the massacre of ’10, its congressional delegation was the smallest since 1823. And it’ll lose more seats after the next census.
But the ’10 massacre also forced Rep. Joe Crowley out of the 7th Congressional District and into the 14th. The 7thbecame a gerrymandered a district built like a Frankenstein’s monster out of parts of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens that had nothing geographically in common except Puerto Rican populations who will keep voting for Rep. Nydia Velázquez, a Democrat, until the city sinks beneath the waves.
Crowley, who is paler than birch trees, had no shot at the new 7th. But he settled down comfortably in the 14th, winning 70% of the vote by just showing up, without the fuss of a primary challenge. While representing a Hispanic district in Queens, he was allegedly living comfortably in Arlington, Virginia.
That was never going to last.
New York City’s working class white population is an endangered species. If you’re not on welfare or earning well in the six figures, you can’t afford to live there. Crowley’s district was 46% Hispanic. It had the second highest share of Latino voters in New York. The machine pol was living on borrowed time.
It’s hard to imagine a more vulnerable politician than doughy Joe, the echo of a 19th century political establishment of barstools and crony government jobs, used to winning ¾ of the vote in safe districts and who had forgotten how to compete in an election (if he ever knew how) facing a Hispanic district.
Of course that’s not the story you see in the media.
Instead the media thrills to its own fake news of how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the “girl from the Bronx”, a Socialist candidate and “giant-slayer”, impossibly defeated Rep. Crowley. And that’s accompanied by analysis of how her victory is proof of the inevitable triumph of Socialism. The media has even begun trying to ‘Obamaize’ her with stories about her brand of lipstick selling out.
The fake news narrative has nothing to do with the truth about Cortez and the reality of the 14th.
The simple truth is that the Democratic Socialists of America and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put in time and money into a district that the Democrats hadn’t bothered to protect because Republicans couldn’t win it. The secret to Cortez’s victory wasn’t socialism. It was her last name.
The enlightened racism
With a majority of 92 against 87, the decision was made against their absorption. It’s not just any Kibbutz but one with an especially high percentage of Meretz voters.
In south Tel Aviv no vote was held. Who are they to be asked? Who are they to have a right to decide someone’s fate? In Afula as well, where last week a demonstration was held against selling apartments to Arab families, no one asks anyone.
Other kibbutzim voted for accepting only a few asylum seekers. What would they have done if the they were asked to accept 100 families? The outcome is known beforehand. More than 40,000 people live in Afula. 150 protested selling the apartments to the Arab families.
In a defamatory article written against the residents of Afula in a paper intended for people who think they’re enlightened, it said “sewage water is running here, according to the zeitgeist, visible and foul-smelling.”
There was no mention of the vote in the Kibbutz, in addition to the demonstration in Afula. It wasn’t a case of 150 out of 40,000 but rather a majority of 92 out of 179. The racism should be attached to those who are not “one of us.”
It’s safe to assume that most of the authors of the articles against racism don’t have next door neighbors who are Arabs or asylum seekers.
So what happens when they come? In many cities in the western world there’s a phenomenon called “White flight”. When foreigners come, the old ones run away.
“It’s not political but rather due to fear of the foreigner, the alien, the unfamiliar,” says Nurit Barkai from Beit HaEmek.
In Afula they are also scared. In Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah they also don’t want Jews. Because sometimes, only sometimes, foreigners are unwelcomed guests.
Objecting to someone only because of their ethnicity is racism. When a Jew moves to Munchen, he doesn’t want to be evicted. He doesn’t object to the existence of Germany. He doesn’t take part in riots, like the ones which have been occurring recently in south Tel Aviv. Those who didn’t want him back then, in the dark days, and those who don’t want him now are racists.
However, not all opposition is racist. According to the EU agreement, initiated by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, regarding Cyprus, there’s a limit on the percentage of Greeks that are allowed to live on the Turkish side of the island, despite the fact thhat they were expelled from there only in 1974.
That wasn’t racism but rather a way to prevent conflicts and unrest. The recognition of the right to self-determination, not only on the national level but on the local one as well. Read more…
At The Education Department, Student Artworks Explore Tolerance And Racism
Empathy, tolerance and acceptance: More and more, educators are focusing on the importance of schools’ paying attention to stuff other than academics.
And for the past two months, an exhibit at the U.S. Department of Education’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., has gathered the work of student artists expressing themselves — through their work — about these issues.
The exhibit is called “Total Tolerance,” and it highlights themes of racism, sexism and diversity.
The student art comes from the National YoungArts Foundation, a Miami-based nonprofit that offers mentoring and fellowships to art students from around the country. Its proposal was selected late last year by the Department and the dozens of works of art went on display in May.
“This exhibition, it really exemplifies why we do this work,” says Carolina Garcia Jayaram, the foundation’s president and CEO. “Together, with the Department of Education, we can signal to the country that arts education is a necessary facet of education for all students.”
As the exhibit winds down in Washington this week, I spoke with three of the 21 young artists, about their art and about how it felt to have their work shown nationally.
Ameya Okamoto, 18, just graduated from high school in Portland, Ore., and will attend Tufts University this fall. Juniel Solis, 16, lives in Miami and will be attending a pre-college at the School of Visual Arts in New York this summer. And Aidan Forster, 17, just graduated from high school in Greenville, S.C., and will be attending Brown University next fall.
Our conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
Describe your work that’s on display.
Aidan Forster: My poem, Instructions for Suburban Boy Love, was inspired by the particular brand of queer isolation and loneliness endemic to suburban life in the South. It stems from questions of loneliness and isolation: What happens when you’re the only queer kid in your neighborhood? Or in your family? Or in your youth group or your circle of friends? When you start to feel kind of like a threatened or endangered species?
From the Inside: What is Racism?
This is a very difficult and vexing question to answer, but perhaps the application of the 3D test will shed some light on this highly emotive and divisive issue.
Of all the important debates South Africans need to have, the most crucial is this: how does an economy generate jobs? What is preventing ours from doing so? How can we fix it?
Almost neck-and-neck with the economy, is: how can we fix our education system?
But there is another issue that absorbs our energy and attention, almost wiping out considered debate on every other topic critical to our future. It is the issue that defined our past: race and racism.
During a month in which the rand lost 18% of its value, youth unemployment rose to 52.4%, and the petrol price hit record highs, South Africa was obsessing about who was accusing whom of being racist.
These episodes included:
- Ashwin Willemse’s allegation of racism against co-commentators Nick Mallett and Naas Botha, during and after a dramatic on-air walk-out following the Lions/Brumbies match on May 16 2018;
- Repeated EFF barbs about South African Indians, culminating in Julius Malema’s generalisation that “South Africans of Indian descent think of indigenous Africans as less human and less capable”.
- Carl Niehaus’s accusation of “downright unbridled racism” against North West University Politics Professor Theo Venter after he said on radio that Jacob Zuma was the worst president South Africa had ever had (which led to the university launching a formal investigation into Venter).
- The Public Protector’s finding that I violated the Constitution by advocating racial hatred (constituting incitement to harm) for tweeting, during an online conversation that “for those claiming the legacy of colonialism is ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water etc”.
The intensity of these debates dwarfs anything I have seen on the economy or education. So perhaps it is necessary right now, despite all our other challenges, to address the question: “what is racism”?
According to the online dictionary, racism is “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.”
But how does one detect or measure prejudice, discrimination or antagonism? Is it merely in the eye of the beholder, (and if so which beholder)? And, if any of these feelings is detected or experienced, how does one determine whether it is the result of an assumption of racial superiority, or on other grounds?
The easiest way of answering these questions is to avoid them entirely and define racism as a personal experience. “If I perceive it as racist, it is racist. You cannot deny my pain”.
Of course, feelings and perceptions are very important in this discussion, especially given South Africa’s history. They are all too real to the people who experience them. There is also a pressing need to include, in the discussion, things like patronisation, paternalism, micro-aggressions and condescension. We need ways of defining them and dealing with them.
But the potential abuse in subjective definitions of racism overrides their value.
Thomas Sowell, the renowned economist, made the point when he said: “The word ‘racism is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.”
In South Africa today, even quoting Sowell makes you racist, as I learnt in a recent discussion. Although he is black, the validity of his arguments are simply discounted by dismissing his “white mentality”. This is the ultimate ketchup smear.
This neatly illustrates my point that unless we get to some acceptable definition of racism, it never ends. Any black intellectual who does not conform to the prevailing orthodoxy can merely be redefined as white (and therefore automatically racist) in order to shut them out of the debate. And so on. And on.
Looking back, the most profound zeitgeist shift in democratic South Africa has been on the issue of race; during the 1990s, non-racialism was still our lodestar; it was progressive to be a committed non-racialist; Somewhere, during Thabo Mbeki’s presidency (probably kick-started by his “two-nations” speech which sought to undo Mandela’s one-nation legacy), the commitment to non-racialism began to change, culminating in Jacob Zuma’s stated view that white monopoly capital was to blame for all South Africa’s problems.
This coincided with the shift towards critical race theory, which defined “whiteness” as South Africa’s core problem and “decolonisation” as the solution.
One of the loudest current online race debates illustrated the point. A group of UCT students advertised a “Decolonised Winter School” which organisers described as “challenging the notions of colonisation and putting the theories of decolonisation into practice”.
Significantly, the suppers were advertised on the Winter School programme as “POC only” with POC standing for “people of colour”.
We are so far gone that reintroducing apartheid is seen by some students at our best universities as part of “progressive discourse”
Racism: Are we brainwashed?
Racism, or the identifying of racist activity, structures, laws and attitudes, is a fickle business, it seems. What is acceptable today, may be laying the seeds of blatant and cruel racist in the future. What was seen as “acceptable” attitudes 100 years ago, are deemed absolutely unacceptable today, and so with things 50 years ago, and so on.
However, I fear that the current trend of politically correct “things” as they stand in South Africa, Europe, USA and other western countries, is laying the groundwork for very dangerous, un-acceptable attitudes in the near future.
These are tolerated today as “corrective” actions for past indiscretions.
What am I talking about, you might ask? First, let’s conduct an experiment.
I am going to table a phrase or a string of words, and I want you to test your own reaction to these. Let’s say you read in the news about the launching of an organisation called: “White Management Forum”.
What feelings, pictures and thoughts are conjured up in your mind? I picture a bunch of white guys, belonging to this club, working together to enhance their white businesses, disadvantage non-white businesses and non-white business leaders, etc.
It would stand to reason that membership of this club or organisation would prescribe that you have to be white. Which would automatically make this a racist organisation. Therefore, such an organisation would be unacceptable to the average, balanced person. If someone tried to start such an organisation, fierce resistance would be meted out.
Such an organisation would clearly be racist in its doctrine, its very reason for existing would be deemed racist, it would be judged unacceptable, contemptable, and (correctly) strong objections and resistance would be felt from society. No acceptable reason for allowing the existence, or tolerating the continuation of such an organisation can be found or justified, in my opinion.
The same would be experienced for, let’s say, the “White Lawyers Association”, or the “White Business School”.
It strikes fear and loathing into my mind!! These would not be tolerated by myself and many more. I have to accept that membership of these organisations would dictate white people only. Images of neo-Nazi activity flashes through my mind as I think of these fictitious organisations… Thank G-D these do not exist in reality.
However, I recently read an article in the business media, and only realised my absolute non-reaction to the content and the name of the organisation in the article after I flipped away from the article. The thought then struck me, I think I have been brainwashed.
The article was about the “Black Business Forum”.
I realised that I was tolerant of this organisation because its existence was acceptable to my mind, because it exists to “correct the historic imbalances”.
After a bit of research, I discovered the “Black Lawyers Association” and the “Black Business School”.
In reality, I found that membership was prescriptive to the colour of your skin. Uhm, therefore, racist. These work towards the exclusive enhancement of black members… Uhm, therefore, racist! And the list goes on…
At the end of this process, I asked myself this:
Why am I not as itchy about these organisations as I would be if they were “White”?
If there existed an equal or mirror to each of these “Black” clubs as “White” clubs, they would SURELY be deemed racist… But we don’t categorise these exclusively “Black” clubs as racist … Why not?
When will the situation be deemed as “balanced”, so that we can get to a point where these organisation are no longer needed, and will these organisations then say “Right, goal achieved, lets dis-band!!”…..
Are we laying the seeds, entrenching and accepting blatant racist structures that surely can develop into dangerous organisations in the future? After all, that’s how the Nazi’s and the NP started……
Look where they ended.
Already the politics in this country and the USA is being drawn on colour and ethnic lines.
Are we (all of us) brainwashed by the PC narrative? Food for thought…
“Baha’is” In Need Of Basic Human Rights
Introduction
For once, we must admit that the tyrannical rulers of the Islamic Republic have come out of this community, and this is the society that allows and authorizes these tyrannical and racist rulers. We participate in all elections, but we claim that people’s discussion is separate from sovereignty. Nevertheless, we do not forget that the same rulers with the permission of these people are at the head of government. Perhaps we protest against racism in some cases, but the protest is not public and pervasive. Of course, it is unnecessary that the people open up to explicit racism in order to call them racist. Unless there is a public protest against the discriminatory and racist practices of the government, it is unknowingly supporting and allowing racism and discrimination. It should be asked how many percent of the people in Iran’s society respect the beliefs of ethnic groups and religions. How many people react to insults, humiliation, and discrimination against ethnic groups?
Prevention of Baha’is Social and Economic Participation
For many years, the Islamic Republic has rejected Baha’is in all fields. From education to the smallest economic activity, even at many times, no pass for the Baha’i dead are issued [1] And in many cities, the cemetery that belongs to the Baha’is can not be found, or these graves are destroyed by the security forces [2].
When we talk about the elimination of discrimination and racism in Iran, we must keep in mind that no religious group or nationalities in Iran are more colorful than the other.
So far, no politicians or intellectuals even attributed to the Green Movement have objected to this issue. Or there have been no campaigns in the run-up to the presidential elections, with the names of Baha’is’ demands. It was not meant for these issues, but for all peoples and religions to support the Baha’i rights and the creation of epidemic campaigns, not just a group of human rights activists.
Perhaps the issue of Baha’is in Iran is more important than the head of the Green Movement. In the years after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, thousandths of the requests for the elimination of punishment have not been made to eliminate discrimination against Baha’is.
In recent years, the most severe repression has taken place against Bahá’ís (even partial) economic activities, including large-scale sealing of Bahá’í shops in Mazandaran [3].
Public Discrimination
In the Islamic Republic’s view, Baha’ism is a political process supported by foreign governments and, according to this view, somehow spies of foreigners, and the individuals attributed to it are considered infidels according to Islamic law. Anti-Baha’i propaganda in the Islamic Republic’s media and the discriminatory and anti-human rights statements of the Islamic Republic’s leaders against the Baha’is are very public.
Discrimination against religious, religious, and ethnic minorities in the Islamic Republic system is not open only to the Bahá’ís publicly. For example, none of the authorities expresses disdain for the Turks, Kurds, Baluchis, Sunnis and others, but the discrimination against these nationalities and minorities is systematically and with the policy of denying discrimination.
But discrimination against Baha’is is open to the public. To the extent that they publicly call the Baha’is unclean and prevent and ban people from companying them.
Education Forbiddance
The most basic human rights are the right to education and the government is required to meet the educational needs of Iran. In recent years, the ban on the education and expulsion of Baha’is from Iranian universities has intensified to the point where the Baha’is underground university is also considered as a threat to national security.
It is important to note that the problem of Baha’is, contrary to other nationalities in Iran, does not prohibit learning in mother tongue, but they are prohibited from studying in universities in the official language of the country.
Problematizing Shiite Islam
The main problem in settling the problem of the Baha’is in Iran is the Shi’a-oriented policies of the Islamic Republic, which, in many cases, also involve the Sunnis in Iran. Baha’ism challenges the ruler’s discourse in the Islamic Republic. A discourse that is rooted in Shiite Islam. This is one of the main reasons for the public opposition of the officials of the Islamic Republic and the Shia clerics before and after the Islamic Revolution with Baha’ism. The Islamic Republic places security issues as an excuse to suppress the Baha’is. After the revolution, the Islamic Republic has tried to link different groups and individual’s effort to achieve their rights to security issues, which results in illegal repression of these groups.
By-Hamzeh Arbabi
References
[1] https://news.persian-bahai.org/, https://noghtenazar.org/node/1269
[2] https://www.noghtenazar.org/node/537
[3] https://bahaicamp.com
[4] https://www.radiofarda.com/a/f3-bahais-fired-university/28239240.html