The Yale University School of Medicine is distancing itself from a guest speaker’s racist rant in which she fantasized about killing white people.
Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a psychiatrist who practices in New York City, delivered an April 6 lecture at the school titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” Audio of the nearly hour-long talk was posted Friday on the Substack website of former New York Times writer-editor Bari Weiss and promptly generated outrage at Khilanani’s hatred of white people and her desire to do violence to them.
In her profanity-laden speech, Khilanani insisted that talking to whites about racism is “useless” because they will refuse to believe they are racists and will think the person complaining about it has a problem.
“This is the cost of talking to white people at all — the cost of your own life, as they suck you dry,” she said. “There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil.”
Later on, she asserted, “We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath. 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.”
Since whites are “demented, violent predator[s]” who cannot be reasoned with, there’s only one thing for a downtrodden BIPOC (black, indigenous, or person of color) to do, she said: “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a f**king favor.”
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Khilanani also said that about five years ago, “I systematically white-ghosted most of my white friends, and I got rid of the couple white BIPOCs that snuck in my crew, too.” She told interviewer Katie Herzog that “white BIPOCs” are those who had “internalized whiteness,” i.e., did not hate white people with every fiber of their being.
Khilanani told the New York Times “that her lecture had been well received” and even garnered praise from some attendees. However, in a statement, the Yale School of Medicine said “several faculty members expressed concern … about the content of the talk,” and the school ultimately decided to post the video online, as is typical for such lectures, but to make it accessible only to those who could have attended it originally. The school also took pains to point out that Khilanani “is not affiliated with Yale.”
In addition, the school added this disclaimer to the video: “This video contains profanity and imagery of violence. Yale School of Medicine expects the members of our community to speak respectfully to one another and to avoid the use of profanity as a matter of professionalism and acknowledgment of our common humanity. Yale School of Medicine does not condone imagery of violence or racism against any group.”
But if the school were really so opposed to Khilanani’s language, why was she invited in the first place? As she rightly pointed out in comments to the Times, “they knew the topic, they knew the title, they knew the speaker.” Indeed, the school’s flyer promoting her appearance states, among other things, that the objectives of the talk are to convince people that whites lack “empathy” for “black rage,” that racism is the result of “colonialism,” and that “white people are psychologically dependent on black rage.”
What’s really upset Yale is that the speech became public, and now everyone knows that, as blogger Rod Dreher put it, “this psychiatrist, under the auspices of one of the most prestigious universities in America, delivered a lecture featuring unapologetic, unrestrained racism, and … nobody [or at least very few] in that institution or in her circles cared.”
One person who did care is Yale professor of social and natural science, internal medicine, and biomedical engineering Nicholas Christakis. “The racism expressed by Dr. Aruna Khilanani in [her speech] at Yale … is deeply worrisome & counter-productive,” he tweeted Friday. “Of course, as an invitee, she is free to speak on campus. But her views must be soundly rejected.”
