The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

by Gabor Maté

The pernicious impact of racism flows from its very nature, which is to see and treat another, in essence no different from you, according to your self-serving, resentful, and twisted fantasy of who they are. The brilliant writer James Baldwin once said, “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a n—— in the first place. If you, the white people, invented him, then you’ve got to find out why.” Recalling the shame I felt as a child at being Jewish, I completely resonate with a powerful formulation by the Black American psychologist Kenneth Hardy:[*] the “assaulted sense of self.” In this state, Dr. Hardy says, “the soul of one’s being gets perpetually punctured . . . It’s when one’s definition of self is defined by someone else. It is when my sense of self is defined by what I am not, rather than by what I am.” He adds, “Who I am thus becomes a response to how I am defined; it’s always in response to something else.”[3]