The New York City psychiatrist who stunned a Yale School of Medicine audience in April when she revealed her fantasies of “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way” characterized white people as “psychopathic” Thursday in an interview with disgraced former CNN pundit Marc Lamont Hill.
Dr. Aruna Khilanani — who also revealed in her talk at Yale’s Child Study Center April 6 that white people “make my blood boil” and “are out of their minds and have been for a long time” — joined Hill on the fledgling Black News Channel’s prime-time program “Black News Tonight” to discuss her shocking statements.
“Would it be fair to say, based on your expertise, that white people are psychopathic?” Hill asked Khilanani at one point.
“I think so, yeah,” Khilanani answered. “I think that there’s many lies … the level of lying that white people do that has started since colonialism, we’re just used to it.”
After Hill asked her to elaborate, Khilanani continued: “Every time that you steal a country, you loot, you say you’ve discovered something. I mean, this level of lies is actually part of history.
“We don’t say that we killed all these people, we got rid of all the Native Americans, we say we discovered America. You don’t talk about the level of death. You don’t talk about the level of what actually occurred,” she went on. “You wipe the slate clean, you sanitize the violence – and you actually got lost along the way, trying to go to India — and then you say you discovered something. And this level of ‘discovery’ is everywhere. You discovered vegetarianism. You discovered yoga. You discovered — everything is a discovery and it’s all actually stolen.”
Thursday’s comments seemed to be an extension of other remarks Khilanani made in her Yale lecture, which was titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.”
“We keep forgetting that directly talking about race [with white people] is a waste of our breath,” Khilanani said at the time. “We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall.”
At still another point in the Yale remarks, Khilanani said that white people “sound demented. They don’t even know they have a mask on. White people think it’s their actual face. We need to get to know the mask.”
Khilanani’s Yale talk made national headlines when audio of it was posted on the Substack online platform of former New York Times opinion writer and editor Bari Weiss. The therapist had previously pushed Yale to make video of her remarks public after the Ivy League institution initially restricted viewings to people affiliated with the university.
In an email to the Times earlier this month, Khilanani said her statements were meant “for people to reflect on negative feelings. To normalize negative feelings. Because if you don’t, it will turn into a violent action.”
Yale School of Medicine issued a statement of its own saying that the “tone and content” of Khilanani’s talk was “antithetical to the values of the school”.
Hill has his own history of offensive statements. He was fired from CNN in November 2018 after calling for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” during a pro-Palestinian event at the United Nations. “From the river to the sea” is widely understood as a call for the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of Jews from the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
*story by The New York Post
