Iran and the Psychopathology of White Supremacy

By Ajamu Baraka

"If Iran has put out any mines in the Hormuz Strait, and we have no reports of them doing so, we want them removed, IMMEDIATELY!" - President Donald J. Trump

The sincere belief that the sadistic brutalization of the Palestinian people would sever their connection to their land; that a sixty-year siege on Cuba would compel its people to abandon their revolution; or that assassinating Iran’s revolutionary and spiritual leadership would force the country to surrender its sovereignty to its historic tormentors in the United States and the Zionist ethno-state of Israel—these are not simply policy miscalculations. They are manifestations of what I call the psychopathology of white supremacy.

This psychopathology is not reducible to individual prejudice. It is a racialized, narcissistic cognitive disorder embedded in the ideological and institutional architecture of Western power. It centers Europe and its settler extensions as the apex of human development and renders its adher…