The more afraid we are of the shadow of racism, the more conscious we might become of our own unsuspected biases.
Interpretation
Fear of racism can lead to greater self-awareness of our own biases.
This quote suggests that when we acknowledge and confront our fears regarding racism, we open ourselves up to recognizing and understanding our own implicit biases. Rather than hiding from the issue, facing these fears can promote personal growth and awareness about how we perceive and treat others.
In practice
During a diversity training session, this quote can be shared to inspire participants to reflect on their own biases.
I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.
The most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he's only a severe example of a common type. The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.
The American birthright belongs, potentially, to everyone. This is unprecedented. Other countries accept migrants on the basis of economic necessity or as a humanitarian gesture. Only in America is it the direct consequence of our foundational ideals.
A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.
Imagination, on the contrary, which is ever wandering beyond the bounds of truth, joined to self-love and that self-confidence we are so apt to indulge, prompt us to draw conclusions which are not immediately derived from facts.
People are feeling and sensing a return of anti-Semitism - even in Europe, which, seventy years after the Holocaust, is a very scary thing. I think they are feeling that Israel is very isolated and doesn't always get what they see as fair treatment in the European media.
Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral.
Tell me there is a God in the serene heavens that will damn his children for the expression of an honest belief! More men have died in their sins, judged by your orthodox creeds, than there are leaves in all the forests in the wide world ten thousand times over. Tell me these men are in Hell; that these men are in torment; that these children are in eternal pain, and that they are to be punished forever and forever! I denounce this doctrine as the most infamous of lies.
As soon as a women gets to an age where she has opinions and she's vital and she's strong, she's systematically shamed into hiding under a rock.
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