In recent years, mental health in America has been a growing concern. But even as awareness has grown, many practitioners overlook important issues. Much of this is related to the field’s political bias, which leads researchers and therapists to ignore entire clinical populations. One example involves race. Left-leaning researchers have spent decades focusing on racial bias as a contributing factor to mental illness, but their research has ignored bias and belligerence directed toward whites.

Our culture is uncomfortable talking about antiwhite aggression. Some of this is understandable. In the public mind, concerns about anti-white hate are linked with white nationalism and other forms of extremism. But all forms of racial hatred are abhorrent, and confronting anti-white hate doesn’t imply hostility toward any other racial group.

Antiwhite behavior manifests in many ways—violent attacks (including assault and rape) motivated by racial animus, bullying at school, insults, harassment, discrimination, and racially demeaning trainings at the workplace. Other examples include university courses that malign whites, and sometimes the news media’s rush to judge white people accused of racism, without sufficient evidence.

My experience as a therapist tells me that these are not isolated anecdotes. A few years ago, I provided therapy for a young heterosexual white man that focused on anxiety, anger, and relationship issues. We talked about his family history and his current life. Then, more than a year into the treatment, he told me that he had experienced pervasive racially charged bullying at both his elementary school and his high school. The bullying included insults, harassment, and some fights. Much of it was explicitly racial, including comments like “white faggot” and “white bitch.” It’s unclear why no one at the schools did anything. He said that he had held back from telling me about it in part because he worried that I would frame him as privileged or “just not get it”—reactions he had experienced in the past from his friends.

An avalanche of feelings emerged. He had grown so used to keeping this experience buried that he became numb to it. Over time, it also became clear that he was in some ways more upset at the current cultural attitudes about race than about the bullying he had endured. He saw traces of his experience with bullying in current cultural dynamics: the racially insulting language like “toxic whiteness,” and the inability of the culture to express concern for white people who were attacked. As we talked, he started to formulate his experience and find his voice. I could see him become more relaxed, more reflective, more open, authentic, and assertive.

Other victims aren’t so lucky. In response to attacks, some people develop PTSD. Others repress their experiences, leading to alcoholism, depression, paranoia, or anxiety. Some lose faith in racial equality and become radicalized; others internalize the hatred and take on a fanatical devotion to DEI ideology.

Unfortunately, DEI ideology provides a rationale for antiwhite hatred (and for ignoring it), with its insistence that racial aggression directed at white people “isn’t racism.” This leaves targets of these attacks unsupported and isolated. Like my client, many fear talking about their experience because they assume others will invalidate their concerns or side with their attackers.

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