Delusions and racial stereotypes

"Unnatural and ever prejudicial Constructions of Race and Colonial Hierarchies by British observers in 19th century Zanzibar"

http://cua.wrlc.org/bitstream/1961/5523/1/etd_jwd35.pdf

Electronic page 13

The author describes stereotypes as things "that needs no proof, [yet the believer still acts as if it] can never, in discourse, be proved. In dual character as that which is already known and yet dependent on being anxiously repeated suggests an important aspect of the racial stereotype that is revealed in its use and function in many colonial sources......

Electronic page 14

"....We always already know that blacks are licentious, Asiatics duplicitous The stereotype becomes an element of unproven prior knowledge that needs no proof of its veracity for its employment as explanation for racialized difference."

Bellow article is an academic article on delusions:

Young, A. (1999). Delusions. Monist, 82(4), 571. (Took pieces of the article):

Many delusions are, according to Maher (1974), attempts to make sense of anomalous perceptual experiences. For example, an elderly person who does not notice that his hearing is failing may form the opinion that people are keeping secrets from him because they seem to be talking in low voices

For Sass, the schizophrenic delusional experience contradicts the usual notion of poor reality testing, with its implication that an objectively inaccurate perception or belief is taken by the patient as real. What seems distinctive about such "delusional" worlds--and what needs to be explained--is in fact the strange tendency of such patients to accord great importance to their delusions while nevertheless seeming to experience these same delusions as being, in some sense, irrelevant or unreal.

(Sass, 1994, p. 5).

Rationality and the web of belief

Philosophers sometimes use the idea that a characteristic of our belief system is its holism--the web of belief. Their point is that the belief system forms a coherent whole and that adjustments to one belief will require adjustment to many others. Dennett (1981) used as an example how a future neurocryptographer (a person who can read and write in brain language) might insert the false belief that "I have an older brother living in Cleveland" into someone's brain. He argued that this is a more difficult task than might be thought. If this belief is to be successfully inserted, we would also have to insert answers to questions about the putative brother--"What's your brother's name?", "How old is he?", "Is he married?", and so on. Then we would also have to alter other existing true beliefs, for example the belief "I am an only child." Dennett (1981,p. 44) concludes that this does not show that wiring-in false beliefs is impossible, but that "one could only wire in one belief by wiring in many (indefinitely many?) other cohering beliefs so that neither biographical nor logical coherence would be lost."

Delusions do not seem to respect Dennett's (1981) analysis (Stone and Young, 1997). Perhaps he was nearer the truth in his later opinion (Dennett, 1996) that the Capgras delusion "should send shock waves through philosophy" (Dennett, 1996, p. 111). From the standpoint of the web of belief, one might expect that the introduction of a belief such as that one's spouse has been replaced by an impostor would result in the formation of numerous other false beliefs. For example, beliefs about where the original spouse has gone, whether s/he is alive or dead, how the transformation was effected, or what explains such strange events. In practice, what one finds is that people who experience this delusion may generate answers to some of these questions, but remain detached from or unperturbed by others. Although they have something which can seem in certain respects like a false belief, it need not be integrated into anything like a coherent web. This brings us back to points made earlier, that delusions can be curiously circumscribed and are not always linked to further actions.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Racism

[wilbertbenjamin]

you've done a wonderful job!!

[Benhamin1997]

This is very good... Take a look at my (Eliminating Racial Stereotypes) video... Its about using your racial lenses during the day.

[BlakeBarbieDoll]

In layman's terms ..."what a f@@l believes he sees.

[jxhensley]

Here's another example: Michael Jackson, even after he had turned as white as a ghost, still saw himself as dark-skinned when he looked in the mirror. In the Granada TV interview he made a reference to people being "as white as my hand" because he was still attached to the idea that his palms were lighter than the rest of him.

[jxhensley]

I love it. This has been on my mind for weeks. People indoctrinated in racism "see" a person differently when based on race. They'll fixate on the features that fit the stereotype, make up excuses for the ones that don't, so that the person becomes the stereotype.

In the 19th century it was common knowledge that the Irish were an inferior race, and I've seen books from that period that describe Irish people with a "black tint of skin."