Why I Hate the United States

I was just talking with a Brazilian man who asked me if I loved the United States. I told him that I hate the United States, which of course required some explanation. It comes down to the following:

1. Awareness of the color of oneself and perception of the color of others;
2. Color-aroused ideation about oneself and others (previously known as prejudice) ;
3. Color and ideation-aroused emotion resulting from the color-aroused ideation (which most people think of as "hate and fear," but which is really considerably more complex, just like your relationship with your neighbors is more complex than "hate and fear," including such emotions as "envy" and jealousy;
4. Color-aroused behavior based on the above perceptions, ideation and emotions.

Let me give you a hypothetical example: A policeman observes (perceives) me driving in my car, and he perceives that my skin is dark brown. So far, so good. His perception of my skin color, even in combination with his perception of his own skin color and that of the majority of Americans is not going to hurt me, in and of itself. Similarly, his perception of the color of the sunset is not going to hurt me or present problems for me, in and of itself.

It is not perception of color that causes problems, and we will never render all Americans "color-blind" anymore than we would want one of our children to be born congenitally color-blind. As anyone who is literally color-blind knows, literal color-blindness is an a debility, not an asset.

However, the passing policeman may havealso learned anti-Black ideation that is aroused automatically by his perception of my skin color. S/he thinks, for example,

That Black man must be doing something wrong, because he is Black and Black people are ALWAYS engaged in illegal behavior. What's more, he's driving a new car, and Lord knows that Black people can't afford new cars. Why does he have a better car than I do? That fucking bastard Black man would like to sex my daughter (or my son). He wants my job. If Blacks keep improving their socio-political and economic status, they will soon eclipse the white "race" and leave us behind. I've got to keep that Black man in his place. (And so on and so forth.) I'm going to stop his car and see what I can find on him.

"Prejudice" is literally "judging people beforehand". But as any knows who has tried a capital murder trial, it is not sufficient to know that there was a preudgment. The specific content of the prejudgment may determines whether the defendant lives or dies. This is why the term "prejudice" alone is insufficient. Believe it or not, the specific content of the prejudgment is important, whereas the term "prejudice" has been used as a catch-all. A doctor who believes that all lumps are cancerous has a prejudice far more dangerous than a doctor who believes that all coughs are colds. The CONTENT of the prejudice is important, just as the CONTENT of the "racism" is important in any specific context.

This is where most of us fall down. We wing the words "prejudiced" and "racist" at people without bothering to study the content of their ideation to discover how dangerous or relatively benign it may be. But let me tell readers right now. Not all prejudice and "racism" is equally dangerous or benign, any more than all cancers are equally malignant or benign. It depends when they started, where they are, how much they have progressed, and how what studies of that particular cancer tell us about the prospects for recovery. Have you EVER heard ANYONE speak of "racism" or prejudice with that level of specificity?

Color-aroused ideation alone will not complicate my life, except when it leads to color-aroused behavior. When the policeman stops me and my car based entirely on the perception of my skin color in conjunction with the policeman's color-aroused ideation and emotion (prejudice), then the perception, ideation and emotion have ripened into color-aroused BEHAVIOR. Without this behavior, I might never know or care about what is going on in the policeman's head. And yet, some color-aroused ideation and emotion is so potent and malignant that it has a high likelihod of erupting in color-aroused behavior.

People who engage in extreme color-aroused behavior based on color-aroused ideation and emotion are people with extreme color-aroused disorder. And this is what distinguishes this analysis from "racism". Those who believe in the "racism" analysis often believe that the thoughts and emotions of the "racists" are the essence of the illness in and of themselves. This is analogous to believing that the desire to drink makes someone an alcoholic even if he has never actually imbibed alcohol. The PROBLEM of alcoholism ripens with the actual drinking, just as the problem of color-aroused disorder ripens for the public with the actual color-aroused behavior.

It is not inherently a problem for the public that a person is a "racist". It is a problem when the person engages in color-aroused behavior, which is like the difference between a bening and localized cancer versus a malignant and metasticized cancer. "It's all the same", you say? Oncologists would certainly disagree, as would psychiatrists, if they bothered to study the differeence between benign color-arousal and malignant and dangerous color-arousal. A man who would like to kill Black people and one who actually does so may be different in significant ways, but we don't know the differences with specificity because we have never bothered to study the question. "It doesn't matter. It's all racism."

Having travelled through seventeen countries and lived for long periods of time in three, I can say based on my experience that while color-aroused ideation and emotion exist in many places, still malignant color-aroused behavior is more pronounced, consistent and dangerous in the United States than it is anywhere else where I have lived. The likelihood of being stopped, profiled, shot and killed by police in the United States simply for being Black exceeds the likelihood present in any other country that I have visited or lived in. Meanwhile, the likelihood of experiencing a color-aroused imprisonment is higher in the United States than in any other country I have visited.

And that's why I hate the United States. I simply hate being perceived, thought about, felt about and then reacted to principally on the basis of my skin color. You don't know how terribly burdensome it is until you get away from it for a while.