Thanks so much for your article, "Psychiatry Ponders Whether Extreme Bias Can Be an Illness" by Shankar Vedantam. Despite groundbreaking work by Gordon Allport, W.E.B. DuBois, and others, the psychological basis for bias has been a hard issue for the majority group in this society to face. In a world whose majority is not white, this ignorance is not only a moral flaw but a practical problem. All of us, certainly including the Washington Post, must give much more intelligent attention to this issue. Once abolitionists, were considered, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's words, "moral monomaniacs who .... had lost sight of all proportion." Today, we would like to dismiss those that study the racism that pervades our society, and that blocks any constructive action on electoral reform, criminal justice, health care, and foreign policy. Such evasion is not prudent, not scientifically sound, and not morally justifiable.
Larry Yates, December 2005