Kehinde Andrews comes to Intelligence Squared on October 16 to talk about his new book ‘The Psychosis of Whiteness’

We live in a strange, looking-glass world, where Piers Morgan is a voice worth listening to about race, where white people buy self-help books to help them cope with their whiteness, and where Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are admired by millions as ‘the right (white) man for the job’.

That’s the view of sociologist Kehinde Andrews, who comes to Intelligence Squared on October 16 to talk about his new book The Psychosis of Whiteness: Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World. He will argue that the inhabitants of this world seem to be afflicted by serious delusions: for example, that racism doesn’t exist and if it does it can be cured with a one-hour inclusion seminar, as well as bizarre collective hallucinations, such as the widely held idea that Britain’s only role in slavery was to abolish it.

In conversation with psychiatrist Femi Oyebode Andrews will explain that the delusions, irrationalities and hallucinations that society conjures up to avoid facing up to the racism at its heart and in its history can best be described as a psychosis, with the costs being borne by the inheritors of that racist history. Black and brown people suffer from a greater number of mental health difficulties, caused in no small part by trying to survive in a racist society.

Join us as Andrews unpicks the lies society tells itself to maintain the status quo and offers a lifeboat out of this topsy-turvy world.