Nonviolence Has Potential to Dismantle Racism

By Katie O’Connor

During his 1967 speech at the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that being maladjusted is generally considered bad by mental health professionals. Yet there are some societal ideas to which people should never be adjusted—particularly racial discrimination and segregation.

In a session at APA’s online 2021 Annual Meeting, Nassir Ghaemi, M.D., M.P.H., invoked King’s words. “If you’re in a racist society, then adjustment means conforming to racism,” he said. “As a psychiatrist, I’ve always thought that idea is pretty interesting because what [King is] telling us is that in a social sense, normal mental health is bad, and some kind of psychological maladjustment is good.”

Ghaemi, an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Tufts University, was the moderator of the session “The Psychology of Racism and Nonviolence.”

“Teaching nonviolence can undermine racism,” said Charles Collyer, Ph.D., professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Rhode Island. As a nonviolence educator, he teaches courses that delve into the psychology of violence and nonviolence. “I think of what I do as primary prevention: Trying to inoculate young people against racism, violence, and corruption,” he said.

“Studying nonviolence helps students to see other people as brothers and sisters,” he added. “They see that other people are more similar to themselves than they had thought, and they see that there is more possibility of finding [common] ground, even with people who are very different.”

Ghaemi noted that the concept of nonviolence in our culture is unnatural. “You have to be taught that it’s a good thing, but it doesn’t come naturally.”

During his presentation, Collyer said that many of his students expressed the desire for nonviolence to be taught in elementary, middle, or high school, so they could learn the concepts before they reached college.

“If you think of violence and racism as being in a way normal, and nonviolence and anti-racism as something that needs to be learned or that’s in a way abnormal, then maybe, since most people are normal and mentally healthy, the way to change things is to change the culture so that people get adjusted to a more nonviolent and anti-racist culture,” Ghaemi said.

Collyer said he regards violence as a sign that somebody failed. Sometimes, the failure occurs with the person who committed the act of violence, while at other times the failure exists somewhere else in society. Steven Roberts, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University, gave the example of a Black man getting into an elevator with a White woman, and the pressure the man feels to change his body language so he appears as nonthreatening as possible. “In that case, he’s engaging in deep violence upon himself,” Roberts said. Collyer pointed out that this example of violence toward the self is also a failure, even though it’s not the failure of the man in the scenario.

In his presentation, Clayborne Carson, Ph.D., urged caution before coming to conclusions about the intent of activists during the civil rights movement. Carson is emeritus professor of history and founder and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. He also participated in the movement himself. “I don’t know whether most of the people who became involved in the sit-ins and freedom rides were drawn there by their commitment to nonviolent struggle,” he said. “I think, to some degree, they were committed to doing whatever would work in the South during that time.”

He emphasized the importance of learning from both the participants and the movements, including the anti-racist movement that is going on now. ■