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.
But when the fairy sang the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.
While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.
There are many doors to goodness. (Saying) 'glory to God,' 'praise be to God,' 'there is no deity but God,' enjoining good, forbidding evil, removing harm from the road, listening to the deaf (until you understand them), leading the blind, guiding one to the object of his need, hurrying with the strength of one's legs to one in sorrow who is asking for help, and supporting the weak with the strength of one's arms - all of these are (forms of) charity prescribed for you.
The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.
But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.
There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.
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