So my bfs son has this mental illness and one of the accompanying afflictions is psychosis/paranoid delusions.

He has tried to explain to me that people in this deep start believing conspiracy theories. His son is obsessed with the Unibomber. He has also since become anti-Semitic because he's a Kanye fan. Because these people feed his mania with conspiracies, in particular Hitler's theory on Jews causing world collapse, etc, his paranoid delusional mind when he's in psychosis believes it. I'm probably not phrasing it well enough, but basically that these psychotic episodes cause them to fall down conspiracy rabbit holes and feed into the hysteria and paranoia.

I'm of the opinion that it's still racism, no matter what causes it. But do I believe his son isn't inherently racist and that his severe mental illness has caused him to believe paranoid delusions? Yes. He's still racist as a result of his mental illness, such as is Kanye. My bfs son was never racist or homopho (his mother is married to a woman) but since his mental illness took affect, he seems to hate everything that isn't white and straight.