We know that we're not supposed to be racially biased, and we don't want to think of ourselves as racially biased, so we tell ourselves a different story.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the internal conflict between societal beliefs regarding racial bias and an individual's self-perception.
Randall Kennedy's quote emphasizes the cognitive dissonance experienced by individuals when confronting their own racial biases. Despite knowing that societal norms require them to be unbiased, people often create narratives to distance themselves from the uncomfortable truths of their prejudices, signaling the complexity of human beliefs and the challenge of self-awareness in combating racial discrimination.
In practice
During a workshop on diversity and inclusion, this quote can be used to illustrate the complexities of acknowledging one's own biases.
All white people in the United States have benefited from a white supremacy. But does that mean that a white person should be viewed badly because they turn against a white supremacist policy? Just because you've benefited from something shouldn't disable you from repudiating it.
In elite, primarily white institutions, there are many blacks who have white wives. So much so that sometimes there is almost the assumption that I would be married to a white woman.
Nothing is more generally known than our duties which belong to Christianity; and yet, how amazing is it, nothing is less practiced?
However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
Betrayed and wronged in everything, I’ll flee this bitter world where vice is king, And seek some spot unpeopled and apart Where I’ll be free to have an honest heart. - Molière, The Misanthrope
It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.
The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.
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