Except psychology is its own historically category that has radically changed since its development.
That is exactly what historians who study this problem are attempting to come to terms with, though.
Do you seriously, I mean really, think that what I’m trying to say is that this stuff is real and therefore we just need to throw our hands up? Becuase what I’m saying is that these have had REAL WORLD EFFECTS AND CONTINUE TO DO SO and we need to understand them historically. When we say racism has real efffects, we don’t just mean that it has created a sense of animosity towards the victims, the other effect has been that it has created empowering ideologies and languages for those who embrace the rhetoric. Because of that it is not just driven by elites creating class categories - it can be driven from the bottom up because it creates privileges for certain groups of people that they other wise would not have had access to.
Just saying “it’s a delusion” isn’t enough, even if its right on the mark, because it has done and continues to do real work in this world -not just in the negative, but in the positive - not in terms of some value of good and evil, but positive in the sense of empowering and privileging some group of people (in this case, white, cisgendered men) over others (everyone else). To not acknowledge that fact is to be historically blind and that means we’ll be that less likely to understand what it is that has happened and how we can effective dismantle it to create a more egalitarian society overall.
