Dr Aruna Khilanani was invited by Yale University’s School of Medicine to give a talk at a weekly forum on mental health. The audio of her address, released recently, has sparked outrage online over a digression in which she describes in graphic, expletive-laden detail her fantasies of shooting white people dead.

The racial disparities in the United States swelled up and exploded last year as a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement rose to demand justice for George Floyd and countless others like him. And as racially motivated attacks against Asian Americans skyrocketed in the wake of Covid-19, the call to ‘Stop Asian Hate’ gained force. America, the land of the free, was forced to confront the inherent racism embedded in its psyche and endemic to its political, social and judicial machinery.

Now an Indian-origin psychiatrist’s lecture on ‘The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind’ at an Ivy League institution has ruffled feathers and sparked outrage online, specifically over a digression in which she describes in graphic, expletive-laden detail her fantasies of shooting white people dead.

According to a New York Times report, Dr Aruna Khilanani was invited by Yale University’s School of Medicine to give a talk at a weekly forum on mental health. A forensic psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with her own private practice in New York, Khilanani welcomed the opportunity and in an online lecture on April 6, she detailed the futility of talking to White people about race, dismissing the exercise as a “waste of breath.” She recalled how her white therapist had called her anger on racism “psychotic”.

“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,” she said during her talk.

Khilanani told the New York Times that going by comments on the online feed, her lecture had been well-received; a Yale psychologist described it as “absolutely brilliant”, while a Black woman commended her for giving “voice to us as people of colour and what we go through all the time.”

The trouble began when the audio of the talk was posted last week on the sub-stack online platform of former New York Times opinion writer and editor Bari Weiss. Since then, conservative publications, alt-right talking heads and social media trolls have had a field day fixating on the following part of her speech:

“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 favour.”

Faced with widespread backlash, Yale School of Medicine issued a statement in which it mentioned that several faculty members had expressed concern about the content of Khilanani’s talk. Despite finding the tone and contents of the lecture antithetical to the values of the school, a video of the lecture was posted online with access limited to members of the Yale community.

“In deciding whether to post the video, we weighed our grave concern about the extreme hostility, imagery of violence, and profanity expressed by the speaker against our commitment to freedom of expression,” the statement said.

When the New York Times reached out to Khilanani for a response on the controversy the lecture had generated, she said her comments were taken out of context to “control the narrative”. She also posted several videos on TikTok slamming Yale’s “suppression of her talk on race.”

“My speaking metaphorically about my own anger was a method for people to reflect on negative feelings. To normalize negative feelings. Because if you don’t, it will turn into a violent action,” she said.

Khilanani’s outburst is only a ripple in the wider discourse on race. While it was inevitable that the “shoot white people” bit would draw flak, it did throw up some interesting reactions that pointed to how a certain community sees and responds to the repressed rage that BIPOC feel after generations of discrimination, mistreatment and racism both overt and casual.