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

by Gabor Maté

As the Black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates tersely asserts, “Race is the child of racism, not the father.” In other words, the very concept of race emerges from the distorted imagination of the racist. Though racism’s impacts are real, in physiological or genetic terms race does not exist. Superficial differences in skin color, body morphology, or facial features do not create “races.” Historically the idea of race arose from the impulse of European capitalism to enrich itself by subjugating, enslaving, and, if necessary, destroying Indigenous people on other continents, from Africa to Australia to North America. Indeed, the word “race” did not exist in any meaningful way until it was created in the late eighteenth century. Psychologically, on the individual level, the “othering” racism entails is an antidote to self-doubt: if I don’t feel good about myself, at least I can feel superior to somebody and gain a sense of power and status by claiming privilege over them.