ArcaMax

"Of course, most people do not understand the reality that probably 98 percent of racism is learned behavior," he told me in an email and telephone exchange, "and maybe 2 percent is due to some serious underlying personality problems."

Indeed, the primitive parts of our brains are hard-wired with xenophobic reactions as a survival mechanism. Our ancestors who thought snakes were huggable creatures, for example, didn't survive long.

The trouble comes when our more-advanced brain circuits don't work hard enough to suppress our fight-or-flight impulses about people who don't look like us. At a time when Americans have elected the nation's first racially mixed president, for example, who knows how many prejudiced brains are blowing a fuse?

I don't believe all racism is a sign of mental illness. Our prejudices are more likely to be a product of our upbringing.

Besides, the professionals can be wrong. After all, it wasn't that long ago, as psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl reported in his 2010 book, "The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease," that doctors diagnosed black people in the civil rights movement as exhibiting an irrational desire to be free.

Yet, as society becomes more comfortable with diversity, those who are not will stand out increasingly as misfits, which in itself can lead some to dangerously irrational behavior. Racism may not be a sign of mental illness, but we owe it to ourselves to learn more about what is.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.

(c) 2014 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.