Why Does Racism Exist? The Mental Health Link
Why would anyone choose racism? Why have people in history chosen to follow the path of evil?
I was raised by two white supremacists.
My father served in the U.S. military, and I often wondered if military indoctrination was the reasoning behind his racism, because his racism was much more extreme than that of my grandparents.
We were forbidden from listening to any black music; MTV and BET were blocked on our television sets to help limit any exposure to that “evil influence.”
My paternal grandparents, however, would watch Michael and Janet Jackson all the live long day. When I told them this was forbidden in my home, they both rolled their eyes and said that was extreme.
However, my grandparents weren’t without their own racism issues; it was just more covert.
For example, they delighted to dig up old arrowheads on their property as evidence of the Native tribes who were displaced or killed who lived there before, but they never ventured to think about the genocide that had to occur for them to own the land they lived on.
For Thanksgiving, I cringe to look at old photos in which my grandmother had made us “pilgrim and indian” outfits.
After 9/11, my grandparents said that Bush needed to follow the lead of Roosevelt, who gathered many Asian Americans and put them in internment camps after Pearl Harbor. It astonished me that they couldn’t see that this was unjust and genocidal.
But my father was much, much worse.
He hung a confederate flag in his basement, even though we were from the North. This confused me: if my father was so patriotic, why hang a REBEL flag of people who LOST?
And racism confused me deeply too.
As a young child, I believed the indoctrination of my parents: they said that all black people were evil, and so whenever I saw one, I felt afraid.
However, there were a few things that confused me: one was that my parents loved The Cosby Show. When I asked why we could watch those black people, my dad said that some black people, very rarely, were good.
Ironically, Bill Cosby is not good: he’s a serial rapist, just like my father.
Secondly, I gravitated on instinct to people at school who felt like outcasts, because it’s how I felt in my home life. I’d regularly befriend black people, gay boys, and very depressed girls at school.
Therefore, I was very young when I started to argue about racism with my family, but the topic made them absolutely enraged with explosive anger and violence, so I mostly avoided it.
But, in my reading, the topics of racism and genocide became one of the obsessions I harbored with my undiagnosed autism. For three years, from 9–12, I read almost nothing else. My parents didn’t censor what I read, thankfully.
One day, I asked my mother, “If the Holocaust happened here, would we have done something?”
“Of course,” my mother replied, “We’re good people.”
What I didn’t know because I wasn’t being taught it in schools: the Holocaust ALREADY happened here and was foundational to our country.
100 million natives were killed, and at the time I was growing up, genocide surviving natives were still losing land and still experiencing sexual abuse and disappearances at government sponsored boarding schools. Hitler had designed his own Holocaust after ours.
I didn’t yet understand how slavery, organized terrorism like the KKK, the creation of the racial ghettos, and segregation were all signs of an active genocide.
I didn’t know I was living in a gangrene wound. and what everyone in the country was already doing in their eras of history was exactly what they’d do in a genocide.
I didn’t come from a family who was doing anything but upholding it.
The number one insults my mother hurled at me was that I was a “n***** lover” and a “slut.” Indeed, as I got older, I loved black people as friends, and I even fell in love with a black boy in high school. I was genuinely attracted to all races and I’ve dated all races throughout my life, yet it’s not in this sense that I don’t see color. I sought to understand and learn from my lovers of color through the lens of the pain they shared about racism. I was attracted to all races because we all seemed human to me so we all seemed capable of being hot.
But there were contradictions about my parents and their racism too.
For example, one time my sister and I saw a movie on Disney on The Jackson Five. We kept the volume low as we watched it in our play room secretly, but we fell in love with the infectious music. We kept our love a secret, and we’d check the TV Guide to know if the movie would be playing again.
Then we got up one day for Easter and found our baskets. Our parents were still getting out of bed. Both of us looked at each other in complete SHOCK: we’d both been gifted…
A JACKSON FIVE TAPE.
We were still young enough that we believed in the Easter bunny. So, my sister’s survival instinct — which was ALWAYS faster than mine — kicked in. She snatched her tape out of the basket, ran to the corner where a pile of blankets were folded, and shoved her tape into the pile to hide it from our parents. I quickly did the same.
This meant that…the Easter bunny wasn’t racist.
Our parents came down and watched us go through our baskets. They asked if there was anything else anywhere. We said no. And they never said another thing about it. They let us keep our secret tapes.
It’s only now that I understand that when my mother hurled “n***** lover” at me, what she flung was her own projection of shame.
Because they did love black culture: my father even wore his hair in a curly Afro. And they obsessed over the neighbors — in hatred, yes, but it’s probably more accurate to say they obsessed in a mixture of envy, fear, and insecurity.
However, this empathy for them isn’t to erase their damage. My father was a rapist, a white supremacist terrorist of children.
He hated himself too, attempting suicide and failing.
At 16, when I discovered 2Pac — a poet with undiagnosed BPD like me — I tried to get my mother to listen to one of his songs to hear his compassion towards women.
2Pac’s music covered the full range of the human experience — he could make you dance; he could make you horny; he could make you face the world’s lies and inequalities; and he could make you cry. His compassion was unmatched, and with his talent alongside that, he became a target for narcissists and was murdered.
But before his death, I played a few seconds of “Keep Ya Head Up” for my mother, and she suddenly started to SCREAM at the top of her lungs, “Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off! Evil! Evil! Evil!”
I couldn’t understand how she could call what he was saying evil; it was a song of LOVE. But he TRIGGERED HER LIKE NO OTHER.
What they accuse is confession, and racism is EVIL.
What triggered my mother was the proof in 2Pac’s art that her generalizations of racism were wrong. What triggered her was his humanity and compassion, traits she and my father didn’t have.
What triggered her was the fear that SHE WAS EVIL.
I saw this in my father too. One time, while discussing fascism, my father asked me, “Why do they say fascism is right wing? Fascism is left wing.”
I answered, “Fascism just means you turn violence and oppression on your own people to control them. It can be right or left wing, any political group can adopt fascism.”
I saw him FLINCH in fear. It was a revelation for me: it’s when I realized that my father didn’t even know he was a fascist. I thought he was aware of what he was — it was so obvious he was a Nazi by another flavor.
What also triggered my mother with 2Pac was the TRUTHS in his lyrics. He was talking about the REAL America, not the dream version of it: America’s narcissistic false self.
He was talking about the America behind the mask.
Still, I wanted to understand: it was EASY for me to not choose racism. And I’m so glad for that; my life has been enriched by the diversity of the people I’ve known and loved as friends, students, or lovers.
So why would anyone CHOOSE racism? Why CHOOSE evil?
The reason racism exists is because we live in a culture with an unaddressed mental health epidemic:
Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder.
This does not mean that ONLY people with these illnesses are racists or fascists, because histrionics and borderlines and people outside of the cluster b spectrum often exhibit signs of indoctrination and have to do the work to undo their unconscious biases, because racism has been engrained into our culture.
But the people who are doing the indoctrination and the worst racial abuses and genocides in our culture and in our families have NPD, and they may also potentially have ASPD, otherwise known as sociopathy.
Racism manifests for those with NPD regardless of their race. A Mexican narcissist may be a brown supremacist, an Arab one might join an Islamic terrorist group, a white one might be a Nazi, a Jewish one a Zionist.
Or they’ll go the other direction: they’ll align with those intent to hurt them in an effort to attain power by proxy of the oppressors. So, they’ll support a politician who is racist against them or they’ll join police or military. They are racist against themselves, similar how to some women will be sexist against themselves.
Why do these mental illnesses manifest as racism?
Here’s why:
1. Living in fantasy
A narcissist has split thinking: like children, they can only conceptualize things as all good or all bad.
Black or white thinking.
They can’t think in nuance, so they can’t live in reality.
In order to survive, they must think of themselves as ALL GOOD.
But…the catch…they have no stable, internal self to THINK OF. The lack an identity because they were never able to individuate from their parents.
So, what they think of as all good things that define them are actually arbitrary, fantasy things that don’t exist.
This is all just the delusions of grandeur for the false self.
They think their skin must be superior.
Their gender must be superior.
Their country must be superior.
Their social class must be superior.
They get very agitated to not be considered superior in these ways because if they don’t see themselves as the best, then they can only see themselves as the worst.
One of a narcissist’s worst triggers is REALITY, because it collapses their grandiosity.
Narcissists also are shame avoidant, so this is why they are also averse to listening to any history that’s unfavorable to their country, gender, or race.
I couldn’t understand as an educator why some students would get visibly angry to learn about histories they weren’t even alive for: they aren’t OUR guilts. We have our own histories to reckon with, so we have the option to choose to do good.
But they’re living in a fantasy in which their country is superior so they can survive the sins their country is guilty of.
Also, narcissists tend to try to censor history, burn books, supress history, and shadowban and control the internet because history always ends the exact same way for those who do evil: it collapses eventually.
They want to pretend that’s not going to happen to them. They want to live in fantasy. And they don’t’ want those they abuse getting wise to understanding their own power and self worth.
They’re also guilty of doing racist acts against people and using racism to justify it, so they escape the shame of that by believing in racism to believe the delusion that their abuses were deserved justice.
The other number one fantasy that a narcissist has is this:
VICTIMHOOD.
They’re obsessed with a sense of victimhood, when they’re actually abusers who lack empathy or guilt, and often sadistic ones filled with malice who abuse vulnerable people.
They’re obsessed with victimhood because of split thinking once again: they see the world as victims or abusers, so they must be victims — all good.
They also wish they were what society could see as good and not evil: their false self is who they WANT to be.
And they are victims of child abuse, generational trauma, and a severe mental illness and empathy disability.
2. Low Emotional Intelligence
Narcissists are emotionally the age of small children. Due to the experience of golden child abuse, they became emotionally stunted to a young age.
Their brains develop cognitively, but not emotionally. They lack frontal lobe development.
Because they’re only children emotionally, they fear differences. This becomes especially true if they grew up in places with a lack of diversity.
Whenever they encounter differences in culture, religion, how people dress, how people speak, or how people look, they get very scared.
When narcissists are afraid, they lash out in violence. This is why narcissists are also obsessed with gun ownership and being heavily armed, even though they’re the ones killing indiscriminately, not the ones in need of self defense.
The disorder is one of delusion, and they’re paranoid, fearful people who project everything about themselves.
They can be stalking others full time and they’ll say their biggest fear is being stalked. They’re haunted, sick, confused, dangerous children.
Narcissists are usually scared of the opposite gender too: that’s why they’ll be sexist or seek to oppress or abuse them through domestic violence or rape while they have closeted homosexual behavior.
3. Hates Differences
Narcissists also hate difference because they fear that those who are different may be…better than them.
And a narcissist must be THE BEST.
Whenever a narcissist encounters difference, they feel they’re in a competition. This is why you’ll see so many narcissists culturally appropriating.
They’ll have sexual fetishes for opposite races, but they’ll be with them to abuse them in an endless cycle of vengeance and toxicity.
It’s the same reason all of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims were black men. What he was trying to kill in each of them was really his own sexual shame and taboo desires in a racist and homophobic country.
In general, narcissists love conformity and copying the status quo of a certain group they admire. This comes from their lack of an identity. They don’t know who they are, so they prefer for there to be a script they can follow.
They seek to appear both as THE BEST and also “normal.”
The alternative is the WORST and “abnormal.”
Narcissists will dress in matching clothes with the partners they mirror and they’ll even dress their kids in matching clothes to them. They find groups to conform to and they parody their styles, whether this is a group of business people, a group of Nazis, a group of religious people, or a gang.
They flock to careers with uniforms such as police or military, because they are places of strict conformity and also allow them to abuse without consequences while being seen as ALL GOOD, a HERO.
So, whenever a narcissist encounters difference, they start sizing it up and seeing what it has that they lack, so therefore any type of differences become a major trigger.
4. Chronic Envy
The thing that differences trigger in a narcissist is ENVY.
Narcissists are emotionally children, so where those with emotional development can see difference and meet it with ADMIRATION, a narcissist only experiences JEALOUSY.
They remedy this through copying people as much as possible, and they’ll culturally appropriate to their heart’s content to try to appease their envy.
Or they go the other direction: DIAL UP the RACISM (maybe even with a salute that they deny is really a salute….)
I always considered it strange in America that so many white people wanted to claim Native ancestry — my own family did too, but research into our family tree proved it a myth.
And why did so many white people love to wear native inspired jewelry or patterns? I admired them too, but how come nobody talked about the tragedy of what happened to those who gave us this exquisite art?
Why did I drive to work passing a road that said “Indian School Road,” and why was our mascot a Pilgrim? Why was a pilgrim considered a scary predator worthy of being a mascot logo?
Because of their habits of murder, of genocide, of narcissism, of sociopathy.
Narcissistic abuse becomes a parasitic form of sociopathic identity theft. They copy and mirror their supply sources while they secretly want supply to DIE, because a copy can’t compete with an original.
They seek to kill off other races for that reason too: they’ll take everything they envied from those races and pretend they belong to them and that they never did any sort of abuse or theft to attain them.
When a narcissist feels they can’t win a competition, their response is to want the target of their envy to suffer so much trauma that they break as badly as they have been broken or to die if they seem unbreakable.
5. Laziness
Narcissists suffer from ADHD because they’re emotionally children, and they also have cPTSD and are often masking that they’re on the autism spectrum.
As such, they’re as lazy as children.
A lot of them can uphold jobs very well while many can’t — they’re diverse in that regard — but all of them always aspire to having positions of power in which they have to work VERY little, or they can control others and have them do their bidding.
As such, narcissists like racism because they dream of being able to make the people they envy most feel beneath them and do their labor for them.
Narcissists and sociopaths were those who had no qualms having slaves or allowing for other barriers to equality. About 25% of white people in the south owned slaves, so that goes to show you how widespread our mental health crisis of sociopathy is.
6. Obsession with Privilege, Power, and Control
Narcissists can’t regulate their own emotions and they can’t survive without supply sources, so they’re co-dependent people, just like children.
As such, they become VERY obsessed with being able to control others, since they have no control over themselves, their impulses, their erratic moods and emotions, and their impulsive desires to abuse.
Abusing others makes them feel important and gives them a feeling of relief through their illusion of power and grandiosity.
Also, as children, they were raised as “the golden child,” so their parent made them initially feel that they were the most important child on Earth, worthy of all spoiling.
They never let go of that fantasy: they want power, they want to be adored, they want to tantrum and abuse without consequence, they want to hurt and hate whoever they see is the enemy, and they want people to fear them like they feared their narcissist parents.
They want people to see them as the best in the world.
Racism gives them a convenient pathway to allow all of that sadistic fantasy to frolic unchecked. And as they target other races, they simply split them to ALL BAD.
They think they deserved it all. With a narcissist, every day is DARVO: every abuse is the victim’s fault.
7. Needing a Scapegoat
One thing my mother always accused me of whenever I argued with them about racism was, “You hate your own race!”
I always thought that was such an absurd and strange accusation: I could see that being white was a privilege. I saw no reason to hate my race. No race was inherently saintly or evil either.
I just wanted all people to have the privilege of not having race to a factor that hinders their future or affects how people judge or treat them unkindly or abusively.
Aren’t we a country founded on morals of equality and freedom?
Why couldn’t she understand that?
Because what they accuse is confession.
She hated her own race.
Why?
Because she came from people doing evil, racist things.
Because she envied people of color for their differences which she suspected may be better than her.
Because narcissists, deep down, have only a core of SHAME: they’re full of self loathing. That’s why they must craft a grandiose, fantasy self.
In order to survive their shame, they must project it.
James Baldwin astutely said, “I am not a n*****. I’m a man. So if you call me that word, that means you need it. And you need to ask yourself why. And the future of our country depends on that.”
That’s the gospel truth: racist people NEED to have a SCAPEGOAT.
They can’t process their shame, so they must project it onto someone else to survive it. It’s the same reason they have scapegoat children.
They need someone to hate so they won’t hate themselves.
They need someone to judge so they won’t judge themselves.
They need someone to crucify because they can’t punish themselves.
8. Belief in Hierarchies
Narcissists don’t believe in equality, and they don’t even understand the idea of it.
They feel, very persistently, that some people are better than others.
It’s delusion: they can’t understand that difference isn’t good or bad, just random and arbitrary.
A person who walks isn’t better than one in a wheelchair. A thin person isn’t better than a fat person. A rich person isn’t better than a poor person. We’re equal, and we’re just different.
I’m not better than a narcissist as a borderline: I could've been the golden child. It’s chance that I was the scapegoat. It wasn’t a choice.
Where did the sociopaths who founded our country on genocide get the idea of equality when they CLEARLY did not practice it?
From their scapegoats, of course: Native American communities practiced egalitarianism, as did most of the world for most of human history. Capitalism is young in comparison to the 200,000 years of worldwide human history--only ten generations.
Sociopaths design their masks after their scapegoats so they can appear to be good people, but they don’t practice what they preach. They’re hypocrites.
Pathological narcissists struggle BADLY with notions of equality due to their split thinking. They think there are worthless people and perfect people. They also lack empathy, so they can dehumanize and split people with EASE. They have no emotional connection to anyone.
Their persistent belief in hierarchy makes them see life as a competition amongst wolves in which they must claw their way to the top where they belong.
If they see people who look different than them getting to the top of the hierarchy — whether in gender, religion, or race — they feel RAGE and worthlessness.
They feel like they’re losing the game.
9. Generational Trauma
When I uncovered the NPD and ASPD in my family tree and I could see the narcissist naming patterns, I decided to see how far back it went: it went all the way back to the 1600s, as far as my tree went back, to some slave-owning human traffickers.
NPD and sociopathy root in communities that experience genocide and war. We spread it in our families and in the communities we traumatize.
When natives first encountered colonizers, they were shocked by practices of rape and pedophilia, but now both of those things are problems that plague native communities.
The European colonizers who arrived with their mental illnesses were also coming from histories of severe trauma — from wars, to plagues, to patriarchy, to sociopathic monarchs.
As each generation leaves the problem unchecked, it grows and grows, infesting our families with lovelessness, until we see it reflected in our culture as rampant greed of billionaires; the shocking rape, incest, and pedophilia statistics; the rise of fascism; the pandemic of drug and alcohol addiction; increased school shootings, war, and genocide.
Our unaddressed public mental health crisis amounts to a species walking into its own extinction — a species whose souls are dead before its bodies are.
When I visited Cuba, I bought a handmade doll that was ubiquitously sold by women on the street.
It’s called a Topsy Turvy doll: it looks like a black woman, but when you flip its skirt upside down, it becomes a white woman.
When I got home, I looked it up and I discovered that it’s a tradition from slavery.
Female slaves were often tasked to raise their own children AND white children. They had to nurse both and provide entertainment for both. The Topsy Turvy doll was a convenient way to have a toy that they could use for their children and their trafficker’s children.
As I look at the doll, it reminds me of the truth we deny in our racist indoctrination: there’s no such thing as a white history and a black history in America.
Our history has ALWAYS been as connected as this doll. This doll is a relic for how intimately our lives and our generational trauma is yoked together.
Giving one month to black history in America (and making it the shortest month in the year) is yet another way that the country’s mythology misleads us.
Our lives were, and still are, connected every day of the year, going back generations.
In fact, black ancestors is something we all have in common, since human civilization was birthed in South Africa, and skin color was an adaptation to migration over time.
We’re only one species.
To hate another means to hate ourselves. To abandon people with no empathy is to become abandoned ourselves eventually.
If you’re ever gathered in a crowd of people in America, look around: all of you have diverse lineages and ancestry that reach towards every corner of the globe, yet you find yourself gathered in one spot at one singular point in time.
We’re the ancestors of genocide, slavery, colonization, globalization, and imperialism.
Sometimes I close my eyes, imagine myself kneeling to the ghost of my stalker and rapist, a man whose pain lives inside my body, curled in fetal position. He’s all fists and fear.
His lineage is from Mexico; mine is from Europe. Yet we met and collided like an atomic bomb in Texas, a colonized land where slavery, sex trafficking, native genocide, war, Jim Crow, and ICE reigned supreme in a land that used to be Mexico, in a land whose native tribes were made extinct with no survivors.
He gave me a pain so deep and wounding that it’s like I limp through the world with a hatchet to my gut. Daily, I look down and try to understand the wound I walk with so I can make the wound disappear.
I touch the ghost face of the man who haunts me every day in my mind: what wound infected our bloodlines, brother?
What pain is this in my body that you hacked me with?
Sociopathy.
This is the truth of the wound of generational trauma, the gangrene rot in a tree with a bloodline of cyclic suffering.
We’re the collateral damage, the walking dead, the curse of the damned, the sins of the father passed on for generations.
This is Hell.
But we can be the generational curse breakers and crawl our way out.
There’s hope for us. There’s life after a resurrection. The cancer can be radiated.
We just have to break the cycle.
But nothing can be fixed until it’s faced truthfully, and our culture needs to face mental health issues like NPD and ASPD, the two least funded disorders for research.
We can inherit the kingdom of heaven on Earth if we turn away from the false idols of radical hatred and fear and turn towards the divine: radical love and healing.
Love is the only real and supreme power there is; people seek to break it because they fear its power and fear that it will make them feel vulnerable or be abandoned.
The spiritual warfare of this life requires that we are able to finally commit to love above our own self hate and fear of others; we must see our oneness in those different than us and overcome our childhood despair and racial indoctrination.
We must forgive ourselves and others. We must love ourselves radically — flaws and all — and love others radically too.
We must understand that we’re created from the same source.
We have to love ourselves to invest in a culture that gives us humane mental health care and community building and evolution rather than contributes to the never ending cycle of abuse and our societal collapse.
A better world won’t simply be legislated that way: we must invest in addressing the root of the problem through investing in real healing, something every single generation before us has bypassed, cursing themselves to repeat the same historical patterns.
We can heal the wounds of our bloodline — they drank a poison, but the antidote is in us all.
The antidote is love.
Only with love will we begin to heal the wounds within our selves and within our culture.
It’s a tall order, but I’m going to keep fighting for it.
I can see the ways healing has been possible within myself, so I know I’m a reflection of what’s possible for us all and for the future.
I've watched narcissist children grapple with the subject of race in my classes and seem to grow and heal some of their internalized issues while in a safe, nonjudgmental space. Anything we can do to dismantle shame helps people with NPD from needing to project shame through harming others.
I’m alive, and this is the history and the generational trauma I've been tasked to heal, so I must have hope.
This Black History Month, I recommit to my pledge to remedy my blind spots and unlearn my indoctrination. I aim to act in ways that align with my antiracist morals and reach for a better world without prejudice to heal my generational trauma and break the curse of my bloodline.
In doing so, I act in loving and compassionate forgiveness for both my ancestors in pain and those with NPD outside my race whose projected pain hurt me.
I heal their pain within me and pour the healing back into the world: I pray for the diverse and equal America I was always promised.
As James Baldwin said, “I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.”
My memoir, This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder, is now available on Amazon.
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Anne M. Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (KDP, 2024), Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.