Exposing &
COMBATING RACISM

Racism is an evil that must not be dismissed as a phenomenon of the past. Only through education that includes respect for the basic rights of all people and the recovery of spiritual and ethical values will racism finally yield to tolerance.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status...” It is an aspiration shared by Scientologists and articulated in the Creed of the Church of Scientology, “We of the Church believe that all men of whatever race, color or creed were created with equal rights.”

In the 1970s, the apartheid regime still ruled South Africa and, despite international pressure, refused to relinquish its stranglehold on the basic rights of millions of its black citizens and those who sought to free them.

So when members of the Scientology community in Johannesburg unearthed evidence that more than 10,000 black psychiatric patients were detained in nine private facilities and used as a slave labour force, the racist government of South Africa reacted with fury. Scientologists’ investigation had uncovered that the patients lived in utter degradation, with minimal nutrition and care, and were hired out to facilities owned and operated by the Smith-Mitchell holding company, a for-profit corporation that consumed about one-third of the South African mental health budget.

At considerable personal risk, Church members did not flinch. They published a series of special reports exposing the existence of these camps. Refusing to be cowed by the attempts of the apartheid government to suppress the information, including the expedited passage of a law making it a crime for any media to report on conditions in any psychiatric facility in the country, Scientologists took their evidence to the United Nations World Health Organisation (WHO). WHO conducted its own investigation and concluded that “the limited evidence available on the conditions within the private mental institutions suggests that the ‘sanitaria’ are in fact custodial institutions with very few discharges per year, and with poor standards of patient care.... [I]n a country which is amongst the richest in the world, the type and quality of mental health care are determined by the colour of the patient’s skin.”

In 1976, Scientologists unearthed evidence that more than ten thousand black psychiatric patients were being detained and used as a slave labour force. The Church brought this to the attention of international authorities so reforms could be implemented.

After the fall of apartheid in 1994, the Church brought this sordid chapter to the attention of the new government. The inquiry that resulted recommended strong reforms and resulted in a charter of rights for patients. Subsequently, the president of the Church of Scientology International received the Nelson Mandela Award for his and the Church’s work to help end racism and create equal rights for the people of South Africa.

Informing People about the Roots of Racism

Regrettably, mistreatment of people of colour and other ethnic minorities continues in many parts of the world, even in nations that fancy themselves immeasurably more tolerant than apartheid South Africa. Over the past few decades, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights has researched the causes of racism and traced how the false concept of “racial inferiority” has been disseminated. Publishing its findings in 1995 in Creating Racism: Psychiatry’s Betrayal, CCHR documented how certain Western psychiatrists, from the 1800s onward, have attempted to justify mistreatment of racial minorities by means of “scientific studies” alleging their genetic inferiority.

The consequences for our world have been devastating. From the Aryan superiority theories of Hitler to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, pseudo-science of this kind has formed the rationale for massive campaigns of persecution against minorities deemed “inferior.” Indeed, it was CCHR’s research that helped prompt members of the Council of Europe to issue a resolution in 1999 that condemned specific psychiatrists as architects of the “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo.

As a further example, the “father of American psychiatry,” Benjamin Rush, whose face still adorns the seal of the American Psychiatric Association, held that the colour of blacks was caused by a rare, congenital disease called “Negritude,” derived from leprosy. Such far-fetched assessments of racial minorities continue to plague non-white Americans into the 21st century.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights has researched the causes of racism and traced how the false concept of “racial inferiority” has been disseminated, publishing its findings in 1995 in Creating Racism: Psychiatry’s Betrayal.

CCHR revealed that, with the “Negritude” reasoning as its purported justification, African-Americans have been subjected to some of the most barbaric experiments ever carried out in the name of “scientific” research. As recently as the 1950s, in New Orleans, black prisoners were used for psychosurgery experiments which involved electrodes being implanted into their brains. These experiments were conducted by Robert Heath from Tulane University and Australian psychiatrist Harry Bailey, who would later become the subject of CCHR’s investigation as the perpetrator of the deadly “deep sleep therapy” in Chelmsford, New South Wales described on this web site (click here). Twenty years later, Bailey would boast in a lecture to nurses that he and Heath preferred to use black men since they were “everywhere and cheap experimental animals.”

In the 1980s, the Church exposed documents which showed that in the 1950s and 1960s blacks had been singled out as human guinea pigs for testing psychiatric drugs. The records obtained by the Church showed extensive testing of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs between 1953 and 1958 in a CIA-sponsored research programme at the National Institute for Mental Health’s Addiction Research Center in the U.S. These revelations were an important element in securing restitution to victims and bringing about government reforms.

Racism is an evil that cannot and must not be dismissed as a phenomenon of the past. Injustice meted out to racial and ethnic minorities often brings its own punishment years later in the form of riots and civil disturbance. Only through respect for the basic rights of all people and the recovery of spiritual and ethical values will racism finally yield to the tolerance that Scientologists are nurturing and safeguarding today.