No one likes to admit they are racist or bear prejudices. Nor do they even like to be open and honest when they witness racist behaviour.
Interpretation
People often struggle to acknowledge their own prejudices and the prejudices of others.
This quote highlights the discomfort many feel in confronting their own racism and the racism they observe in society. It suggests that an honest confrontation of these issues is often avoided, indicating a need for greater awareness and openness in discussions about race and prejudice.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about the importance of self-reflection in conversations about race.
The era when the United States was the dominant global power is steadily coming to an end, and it must find a way of acknowledging this and framing its ambitions and interests accordingly. Instead of claiming the right to continuing primacy in east Asia, for example, it should seek to share that primacy with China.
If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.
For 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way.
We still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong... this is the reason.
Just six years into the 21st century, one can say this is not shaping up to be anything like an American century. Rather, the U.S. seems much more likely to be faced with a very different kind of future: how to manage its own imperial decline.
While the West has enjoyed overwhelming global power, its moral preachings have been legitimised, and in effect enforced, by that power. But as that power begins to ebb, then the morality of its actions will be the subject of growing scrutiny and challenge.
Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.
Let us fight the battle-retreat from the things that attract us and rouse ourselves to meet the things that actually attack us.
Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?
The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory.
In efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.
There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.
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