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

Adebayo Adeniran
4 min readJun 20, 2021

A brief dissection of the underpinnings of systemic racism.

Danny Lines Via Unsplash

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.

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Adebayo Adeniran

A lifelong bibliophile, who seeks to unleash his energy on as many subjects as possible