Was Dr. Aruna Khilanani Right In Tarring Every White Person With The Same Brush on The Subject Matter of Race And Racism?

In an audio speech that has now gone viral across the world, we hear Dr. Aruna Khilanani, an eminent forensic psychiatrist and psychoanalyst talk about her fantasy in killing any white person, who stood in her way and not feeling guilty or apologetic about it in any way, shape or form.

As expected, the furore and backlash was swift, so much so that Yale college of medicine was forced to put out a statement, distancing themselves from the comments of their professor.

The tone and content is antithetical to the values of the school. We ultimately decided to post the video with limited access to those who could have attended the talk

But what exactly were her comments and were they taken out of context, in the very first place?

In an interview with Marc Lamont, Dr. Khilanani gets to carefully explain the reason and rationale for the extreme statement that she made, which was to access unconscious feelings in white people on the profoundly complex issues of race and racism and the chronic inability of white people to see themselves as anything other than benign and benevolent.

Marc Lamont interview with Dr. Khilanani via BNT and YouTube

Dr. Khilanani goes to explain that it is almost impossible to talk to white people without their being defensive.

In the leaked recording, she is heard saying:

This is the cost of talking to White people. The cost of your own life is they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood b oil.

When asked about the comments above, she explains that while white people are prepared to accept that there are systemic issues of race, they are always completely unprepared to accept how their behaviour as individuals perpetuates inequality.

Dr. Khilanani goes on to state that white psychopathy is responsible for telling powerful lies, which have a stranglehold on popular imagination and culture. such as white people "discovered" America, vegetarianism, Yoga and everything else in between, while simultaneously seeking to sanitize the violence, rape and genocide which accompanied the colonial conquest of India, the United States, Nigeria, South Africa and other parts of the world, in which people of colour are the majority.

What we must know and appreciate here is that Dr. Khilanani's points are not new, in any way shape or form; Anyone who has read Frantz Fannon's " Wretched of the earth, Black Skin White Masks" or grappled with Howard Zinn's " A people's history of the United States of America" will readily recognize that history taught to the masses has been one great lie and the notion of western civilization has been nothing but theft and killings of people who look like me and the Ivy league psychoanalyst.

What's also extraordinary here is that these powerful comments are coming not from an African American intellectual but from an Asian American scholar, a child of voluntary migrants to the United States, often described in popular but racist parlance as the "model minority".

Her willingness to put her head above the parapet in her original presentation and in her interview with Mr. Lamont, does give her a degree of legitimacy and credibility, that very few have on the subject of race and racism in western discourse, today.

It also throws into sharp focus, the white push back on the teaching of critical race theories across the United States.

To all the white writers and would be readers, of this article on this platform -conservative or liberal - who have years of erudition on writing across various disciplines, I should like to pose these questions to each and everyone of you.

· Do you see yourself as complicit in the perpetuation of racism, in the workplace, at university or in public life?

· Are you ever honest with yourself on the question of unconscious bias as it relates to dealing with Black, indigenous and people of colour?

· Have you ever at any point in recent times eviscerated the notion of white people " discovering stuff", with your nearest and dearest?

· Have you ever called out close relatives for their bigotry?

· Do you always get defensive, when the subject of systemic racism gets raised by non-White people?

· Should Black people even bother discussing the issues of race with White people if they aren't prepared to accept their bigotry?

· Shouldn't White people be supporting the teaching of critical race theory like never before, given what we now know about the insidious nature of racism in our society?

If every White reader of this article can truly answer these questions honestly and objectively, then Dr. Khilanani will have been justified in making those comments captured in the footage embedded to this page.

It would be nice to see what the myriad readers have to say on this complicated but much needed debate on race, in today's world.

Thanks very much for reading.