Is Racism Linked to Narcissism?

Yes. Racism is linked to narcissism. See the research done on this below. 

According to a Very Well Mind article, The Link Between Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Racism by Nadra Little and fact-checked by Rich Scherr:
     * A recent study has drawn a link between racism and certain personality disorders, such as psychopathy and narcissism.
     * In many cases, a lack of empathy can lead to harmful beliefs about others.
     ... Psychopathic traits such as a lack of empathy and callousness are predictive of prejudicial tendencies. ...

Should anyone be surprised? The lack of empathy, the propensity to be highly negative and judgmental about other people and even to dismiss their concerns and voices, the need to control other people and put them into submissive positions, nitpicking people apart endlessly because they don't seem "perfect enough" for the narcissist, the need for narcissists to destroy the self esteem of others who do not reach their impossible and often unwarranted "perfection standards", and the grandiose views that narcissists have of themselves, we shouldn't be surprised at all. 

I have written about prejudice in Narcissistic Personality Disorder myself in this post and also made mention of it in the post, Warning: The "You're Useless" Phrase, the "You're Nobody" Phrase and "You're Worthless" Phrase in Narcissistic Abuse and Domestic Violence.

One other take-away from the article I found interesting:

The Role of Machiavellianism and Narcissism
     Roy said that his research stands out because, while numerous studies have investigated the toll of racism on minority groups, few have examined the personality traits that make individuals more inclined to hold racist views.
     A 2017 Austrian study however, found that those with the four dark tetrad personality traits—psychopathy, narcissism, sadism, and Machiavellianism—were more likely to vote for a xenophobic presidential candidate with right-wing views.
     The researchers studied 675 Austrian citizens (264 females, 411 males) with a mean age of 35.9. The study found a positive association between the dark tetrad and a political right-wing attitude, with Machiavellianism emerging as the most important predictor that one would have such views.

The narcissists I have known in my own life were heavily sexist, more than racist, and included women being sexist - hard to believe, except that narcissistic women typically compare themselves to other women and find other women to be lacking in personality, grace, talent, success, and beauty compared to themselves. But, to be fair, I also never saw that people of different races, or people of color, were part of their inner, or even their outer, friendship circles.   

At any rate, noticeable prejudice is always going to be part of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It will just manifest in different ways depending on their social circle and their family's attitudes, whether that be sexism, racism, cultural, religious, sexual orientation, weight, education, or some other human issue they like to laugh about, and talk derisively about (perhaps the health practices of others, the jobs of others, the mental health of others, refugees, the disabilities of others, the style of clothes other people wear, the type of groups people associate with, people in certain professions, people who believe in God or aliens ... it can be anything). What kind of people they talk about derisively will clue you in to where their prejudices lie.

Most of the rest of us have open minds enough not to shut down the possibilities that people who look and think differently than us may have "more brilliant realizations" than we do, especially if we are not in a hierarchical frame of mind or a comparative frame of mind to begin with, where we see others as equals to ourselves, no more or less powerful, no more or less deserving, no more or less submissive, in other words. We realize that perspectives come from our experiences, how we filter those experiences, and how we react to those experiences, and how our personality developed, and whether we have "openness to new experiences and styles of thinking." 

I have an article I'm working on that talks about narcissism and racism, so I thought I'd publish this preliminary post first. The links to the research into this phenomenon are below:  

Racism: A Symptom of the Narcissistic Personality - by Carl C. Bell for Journal of National Medical Association and the National Library of Medicine - professional paper

Racism, Narcissism, and Integrity - by Carl C. Bell for Journal of National Medical Association and the National Library of Medicine - professional paper

Racism: A Mental Illness? - by Carl C. Bell Community Mental Health Council, Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago and Psychiatry Online - professional paper

The roles of gaslighting and narcissism in racism - by Dr. Ramani Durvasula (You Tube video)

Intolerance and Psychopathology: Toward a General Diagnosis for Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia - by Mary H. Guindon, Ph.D., Alan G. Green, Ph.D., and Fred J. Hanna, Ph.D. for Wiley Online Library - professional paper

THE “SICK” RACIST (Racism and Psychopathology in the Colorblind Era) - by James M. Thomas and W. Carson Byrd for the Cambridge University Press (book)

Beyond Empathic Failures: Cultural Racism as Narcissistic Trauma and Disenfranchisement of Grandiosity - by Maria T. Miliora for Clinical Social Work Journal

Racism: Revisiting Carl Bell (When racism and narcissism collide.) - by J. Luke Wood, Ph.D. for Psychology Today

The Narcissism of Whiteness - by Cheryl E. Matias for Brill - professional paper

Racial implications of the narcissistic personality inventory reinterpreting popular depictions of narcissism trends - by Mike A. Males for Oat - professional paper

How Narcissism & Racism Are Connected, According To Research - by Abby Moore for Mind, Body Green

Whiteness as Pathological Narcissism - by Arianne Miller, M.A. and Lawrence Josephs, PhD for Taylor and Francis Online 

Narcissistic Racial differences in narcissistic tendencies - by Virgil Zeigler-Hill and Marion T. Wallace for Science Direct - professional paper

Pale Narcissus: The Role of Primitive Narcissism in the Relationship between White Privilege Attitudes and Modern Racism - by Adam Breakey Hinshaw for Mo Space - professional paper

Alt-Right: Are Racists Mentally Ill? Some Psychiatrists Say Yes - by by Jessica Firger for Newsweek

Personality Traits Could Predict Those Prone to Prejudice - administrators of Neuroscience News (original source: The University of Oregon)

A Psychiatrist’s Perspective on Racism: 2020 - by Rahn K. Bailey, MD for Psychiatric Times

If Racism Is Broadway, Narcissism Is Grand Central - by Donald E. Collins, Ph.D.

Piper Devi: The link between malignant narcissism, racism and fascism - by Piper Devi, holistic counselor for TheUnion.com

Racism and narcissism: America’s original sin (The racist, narcissistic behaviour that characterises the Trump administration has its roots in US colonial history.) - by Donald Earl Collins, Visiting Professor of African American History with Loyola University Maryland for Aljazeera

Types and Traits of White Narcissists (A guide on how to spot the worst of the worst of white supremacists) - by Savannah Worley for Medium.com

Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream - by Tiffanie Drayton

The Deadly Collision of Racism and Mental Illness - by Eyal Press for The New York Times

It's Totally OK To Unfriend Your Racist Friends — In Fact, You Should - by Laura Mae Lindo for Your Tango

Narcissism topics - Science.gov (government website with a list of topics on narcissism, including narcissism with racism)

Diagnosing Racism - by James M. Thomas, PhD for his own website

Are narcissism and racism linked? They may be, in Donald Trump. - by Jerry Adler, senior editor for Yahoo News

White Narcissism - by Ron McDonald for Friends Journal

Is Racism a Disease? (Since the 1940s, mental health professionals have repeatedly debated the question of whether (some forms of) racism can be classified as a disease.) - by Livia Gershon for JSTR

Racists are essentially Narcs - Lipstick Alley (forum)

MORE ARTICLES SINCE PUBLISHING

The Young Conservatives Trying to Make Eugenics Respectable Again (The pseudoscience of race provides both a justification of hierarchies and an enemy to rail against.) - by Adam Serwer for The Atlantic (2023)
excerpt:
     ... One explanation for the resurgence of scientific racism—what the psychologist Andrew S. Winston defines as the use of data to promote the idea of an “enduring racial hierarchy”—is that some very rich people are underwriting it. Mathias notes that “rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania.” As the biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks tells the science reporter Angela Saini in her book Superior, “There are powerful forces on the right that fund research into studying human differences with the goal of establishing those differences as a basis of inequalities.” 

     There is no great mystery as to why eugenics has exerted such a magnetic attraction on the wealthy. From god emperors, through the divine right of kings, to social Darwinism, the rich have always sought an uncontestable explanation for why they have so much more money and power than everyone else. In a modern, relatively secular nation whose inequalities of race and class have been shaped by slavery and its legacies, the justifications tend toward the pseudoscience of an unalterable genetic aristocracy with white people at the top and Black people at the bottom. ...

     ... “The lay concept of race does not correspond to the variation that exists in nature,” the geneticist Joseph L. Graves wrote in The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium. “Instead, the American concept of race is a social construction, resulting from the unique political and cultural history of the United States.” ...

     ... Scientific racism is little more than a resurrection of slaveholder ideology given an empirical sheen. As the proslavery congressman James Henry Hammond declared in his 1850s “Cotton Is King” speech, “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” When Hanania wrote that “even if groups differ in skills or cognitive abilities, we can all still benefit from the division of labor,” he offered a not-so-subtle restatement of this idea. Note that he refers not to “people” or “individuals” but “groups.” Woe to those born into the wrong caste! ...
     My note: In this we see narcissistic hierarchical thinking: they believe they are always better, smarter, and if they can "under-class" one group of people, they will keep trying to "underclass" other groups so that they will have no competition for resources, or "entitled wealth". 
     What is next? More past prejudices emerging like disenfranchising the Irish, Catholics, Jews and every other manner of immigrants? 
     James Henry Hammond's declaration that we must have a "drudgery class" of people so that intellectualism and progress can thrive is obviously false in light of the fact that American progress has meant "machines can do the drudgery" to free most minds to pursue some goals other than hard or dangerous labor in their lives and thinking. Now we have AI and robots. Not that this isn't taking jobs away, but it is enabling most of us to stop being "docile" to quote James Henry Hammond.
     Part of being smarter is being more empathetic, and looking at the reasons people who think they are "greater than you" are treating you so badly. Treating people dismissively, badly, and hierarchically is not smarter; it is just denying to them that they have intelligence and must work as either an indentured servant to a "class of narcissists". No thanks!