Unconscious Racism Quotes

I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

Racism is the norm rather than an aberration. Feedback is key to our ability to recognize and repair our inevitable and often unaware collusion. In recognition of this, I try to follow these guidelines: 1.   How, where, and when you give me feedback is irrelevant—it is the feedback I want and need. Understanding that it is hard to give, I will take it any way I can get it. From my position of social, cultural, and institutional white power and privilege, I am perfectly safe and I can handle it. If I cannot handle it, it’s on me to build my racial stamina. 2. Thank you. The above guidelines rest on the understanding that there is no face to save and the game is up; I know that I have blind spots and unconscious investments in racism. My investments are reinforced every day in mainstream society. I did not set this system up, but it does unfairly benefit me, I do use it to my advantage, and I am responsible for interrupting it. I need to work hard to change my role in this system, but I can’t do it alone. This understanding leads me to gratitude when others help me.

We're all in the race game, so to speak, either consciously or unconsciously. We can overtly support white-supremacist racial projects. We can reject white supremacy and support racial projects aimed at a democratic distibution of power and a just distribution of resources. Or we can claim to not be interested in race, in which case we almost certainly will end up tacitly supporting white supremacy by virtue of our unwillingness to confront it. In a society in which white supremacy has structured every aspect of our world, there can be no claim to neutrality.

It's often unconscious, but their perception of The Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they'll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them.

Elder was right and he damn well knew it. “The biggest burden that black people have is being raised without fathers,” he declared. “A black kid raised without a dad is five times more likely to be poor and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to end up in jail. When I hear people tell me about systemic racism or unconscious racism I always say ‘give me an example.’ And almost nobody can do it. I give the facts . . . and [according to left-wingers] the facts are racist.

Proximity to and even intimacy with BIPOC does not erase white privilege, unconscious bias, or complicity in the system of white supremacy. Being in a relationship with a BIPOC or having a biracial or multiracial child does not absolve a person with white privilege from the practice of antiracism.

To ‘not see colour’ is to unconsciously erase the experiences of people of colour that have occurred as a direct result of their race.

Eventually, some black thinkers believe, this "separation" may be the shortest route to an authentic communication at some future date when blacks and whites can enter into encounters in which they truly speak as equals and in which the white man will no longer load every phrase with unconscious suggestions that he has something to "concede" to black men or that he wants to help black men "overcome" their blackness.

After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven't you said this yourself? Haven't you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don't forget.

Economist David Marks has said that beauty is as potent a social force as race or sex. But unlike racism and sexism, which we are conscious of, “lookism,” or beauty prejudice, operates at a largely unconscious level.

When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of “the public” becomes conditional. It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.

n sum, let us enter a plea for clinical clinicians who can distinguish unconscious depression from conscious despair, paranoia from adaptive wariness, and who can tell the difference between a sick man and a sick nation.

The most tragic error into which older people can fall is one that is common among educators and politicians. It is to use youth as scapegoats for the sins of their elders. Is the nation wasting its young men and its honor in an unjust war? Never mind — direct your frustration at the long-haired young people who are shouting in the streets that the war must end. Curse them as hippies and immoral, dirty fanatics; after all, we older Americans could not have been wrong about anything important, because our hearts are all in the right place and God is always on our side, so anyone who opposes us must be insane, and probably in the pay of the godless Communists. Youth is in the process of being classed with the dark- skinned minorities as the object of popular scorn and hatred. It    is   as  if  Americans  have  to  have  a  "nigger,"  a  target                             for its hidden frustrations and guilt. Without someone to blame, like the Communists abroad and the young and black at home, middle America would be forced to consider whether all the problems of our time were in any way its own fault. That is the one thing it could never stand to do. Hence, it finds scapegoats. Few adults, I am afraid, will ever break free of the crippling attitudes that have been programmed into their personalities – racism, self-righteousness, lack of concern for the losers of the world, and an excessive regard for property. One reason, as I have noted, is that they do not know they are like this, and that they proclaim ideals that are the reverse of many of their actions. Such hypocrisy, even if it is unconscious, is the real barrier between them and their children.

Nationalism, racism, and fascism are in fact nothing other than ideological guises of the flight from painful, unconscious memories of endured contempt into the dangerous, destructive disrespect for human life, glorified as a political program.

Tokenism of BIPOC is a white supremacist act because it still places BIPOC as objects that can be used to further a white person’s or organization’s agenda, and it protects people with white privilege from having to do the work of disrupting white dominance. Tokenism looks flattering on the outside, but the truth of it is that it uses BIPOC as if they are things, not people. Tokenism says that BIPOC are only valuable to people with white privilege to the degree that they can be used for their own agenda (whether consciously or unconsciously).

The conundrum of the twenty-first (century) is that with the best intentions of color blindness, and laws passed in this spirit, we still carry instincts and reactions inherited from our environments and embedded in our being below the level of conscious decision. There is a color line in our heads, and while we could see its effects we couldn’t name it until now. But john powell is also steeped in a new science of “implicit bias,” which gives us a way, finally, even to address this head on. It reveals a challenge that is human in nature, though it can be supported and hastened by policies to create new experiences, which over time create new instincts and lay chemical and physical pathways. This is a helpfully unromantic way to think about what we mean when we aspire, longingly, to a lasting change of heart. And john powell and others are bringing training methodologies based on the new science to city governments and police forces and schools. What we’re finding now in the last 30 years is that much of the work, in terms of our cognitive and emotional response to the world, happens at the unconscious level.

regardless of the false nature of racial categories, the concept of race holds great social force. Our society uses race in spite of some people’s disavowal and often treats us differentially as a result. Race has truly gotten under our skin, into our psyche, and lingers within the layers of our unconscious. To begin honestly, we must discuss what may be the most challenging aspect of any discussion of race. We must deal with the terms racist, racism, and systemic white supremacy. We must also confront the fact that some people might ask us to associate those words with our speech and actions.

The word “racism” went out of fashion in the liberal haze of racial progress—Obama’s political brand—and conservatives started to treat racism as the equivalent to the N-word, a vicious pejorative rather than a descriptive term. With the word itself becoming radioactive to some, passé to others, some well-meaning Americans started consciously and perhaps unconsciously looking for other terms to identify racism. “Microaggression” became part of a whole vocabulary of old and new words—like “cultural wars” and “stereotype” and “implicit bias” and “economic anxiety” and “tribalism”—that made it easier to talk about or around the R-word. I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.

Again, it is important to stress that this belief is not necessarily a consciously chosen one. It is a deeply hidden, unconscious aspect of white supremacy that is hardly ever spoken about but practiced in daily life without even thinking about it. The reality is that you have been conditioned since you were a child to believe in white superiority through the way your history was taught, through the way race was talked about, and through the way students of color were treated differently from you. You have been educated by institutions that have taught white superiority through curricula that favor a white-biased narrative, through the lack of representation of BIPOC, and through the way these institutions handled acts of racism. You have been conditioned by media that continues to reinforce white superiority through an overrepresentation of celebrities and leaders who look like you, through the cultural appropriation of BIPOC fashion, language, and customs, and through the narrative of the white savior.

The graphic photographs of Emmett Till’s brutalized body after it was retrieved three days later, flashed across the screen,” says Baker. “I sprang off the couch and screamed ‘No!’ It was the immediate and universal anguish every mother feels at the sight of such cruelty to a child. My heart was broken wide open, and from that moment, I began reviewing how, decade by decade, I had unconsciously been consuming racism my whole life. I read and wrote and read and wrote. And that was the beginning of my journey.

And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason. A dim notion of what life meant to a Negro in America was coming to consciousness in me, not in terms of external events, lynchings, Jim Crowism, and the endless brutalities, but in terms of crossed-up feeling, of psyche pain. I sensed that Negro life was a sprawling land of unconscious suffering, and there were but few Negroes who knew the meaning of their lives, who could tell their story.

1995, for example, on the occasion of its 150th anniversary, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) officially apologized for “condoning” racism. The SBC resolution in part stated, “We apologize to all African Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime, and we genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously or unconsciously.” Gary Frost, a black pastor who is a SBC second vice president, formally accepted the apology. He said, “We pray that the genuineness of your repentance will be reflected in your attitudes and in your actions.”1

This is where racism becomes strategically useful. Whatever the Koch movement operatives (which now include many Republican politicians) believe in their hearts about race, they are comfortable with deploying strategic racism because popular stereotypes can help move unpopular ideas, including limiting democracy. Take for example the widespread unconscious association between people of color and criminals; anti-voting advocates and politicians exploited this connection to win white support for voter suppression measures. They used images of brown and Black people voting in ads decrying “voter fraud,” which has been proven repeatedly to be virtually nonexistent and nonsensical: it’s hard enough to get a majority of people to overcome the bureaucratic hurdles to vote in every election; do we really think that people are risking jail time to cast an extra ballot? Nonetheless, the combination of the first Black president and inculcation through repetition led to a new common sense, particularly among white Republicans, that brown and Black people could be committing a crime by voting. With this idea firmly implanted, the less popular idea—that politicians should change the rules to make it harder for eligible citizens to vote—becomes more tolerable.

Nor will arguments be of any use against a fascist who is narcissistically convinced of the supreme superiority of his Teutonism, if only because he operates with irrational feelings and not with arguments. Hence, it would be hopeless to try to prove to a fascist that black people and Italians are not racially "inferior" to the Teutons. He feels himself to be "superior," and that's the end of it. The race theory can be refuted only by exposing its irrational functions, of which there are essentially two: that of giving expression to certain unconscious and emotional currents prevalent in the nationalistically disposed man and of concealing certain psychic tendencies.

This is the sort of thing that was probably meant by the phrase 'institutional racism' with reference to the police...a lot of the criticism of that came from people who thought that every police officer was thus being called a racist, but it was different from that...soldiers in a regiment are imbued with a sort of invisible ...feeling, which is again picked up by a hundred little example, some too small to see consciously...young officers see and hear their elders and superiors using language or making jokes, or overlooking remarks that they make, which have a racist tendency. The general assumption is that that's the way we, the force, the canteen, the people in uniform - us - that's the way we see things. It all resonates and gets amplified. And because a lot of this is subliminal and unconscious and never actually put into 'racist' words...it's easy to deny that it exists, and it is even easy to believe that it doesn't.

From working with black males for more than a dozen years, I can say with confidence that many black males are both lazy and irresponsible. This view isn't popular with problem profiteers who blame all black woes upon white racism or poverty, but it is true, nonetheless. The young men I work with represent just the tip of the iceberg of a far larger laziness problem within the black male population. The typical black male I work with has no work ethic, has little sense of direction in his life, is hostile toward whites and women, has an attitude of entitlement, and has an amoral outlook on life. He has no strong male role model in his life to teach him the value of hard work, patience, self-control, and character. He is emotionally adrift and is nearly illiterate-either because he dropped out of school or because he's just not motivated enough to learn. Many of the black males I've worked with have had a "don't give a damn" attitude toward work and life and believe that "white America" owes them a living. They have no shame about going on welfare because they believe whites owe them for past discrimination and slavery. This absurd thinking results in a lifetime of laziness and blaming, while taxpayers pick up the tab for individuals who lack character and a strong work ethic. Frequently, blacks who attempt to enter the workforce often become problems for their employers. This is because they also have an entitlement mentality that puts little emphasis on working hard to get ahead. They expect to be paid for doing little work, often show up late, and have bad attitudes while on the job. They're so sensitized to "racism" that they feel abused by every slight, no matter if it's intentional, unconscious, or even based in reality.

(Il est à noter que le propre des idées autosuggérées est d’exister en nous à notre insu et que nous ne pouvons savoir qu’elles y existent que par les effets qu’elles produisent.) - It should be noted that the characteristic of autosuggested ideas is to exist in us without our knowledge; and that we can only know that they exist there by the effects they produce.

New research suggests that we may hold an unconscious bias against creative ideas much like we do in cases of racism or phobias.

An important example is the debate around Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and All Lives Matter. Can you believe that black lives matter and also care deeply about the well-being of police officers? Of course. Can you care about the well-being of police officers and at the same time be concerned about abuses of power and systemic racism in law enforcement and the criminal justice system? Yes. I have relatives who are police officers—I can’t tell you how deeply I care about their safety and well-being. I do almost all of my pro bono work with the military and public servants like the police—I care. And when we care, we should all want just systems that reflect the honor and dignity of the people who serve in those systems. But then, if it’s the case that we can care about citizens and the police, shouldn’t the rallying cry just be All Lives Matter? No. Because the humanity wasn’t stripped from all lives the way it was stripped from the lives of black citizens. In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves. And whether we directly participated in that or were simply a member of a culture that at one time normalized that behavior, it shaped us. We can’t undo that level of dehumanizing in one or two generations. I believe Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens in the hearts of those of us who have consciously or unconsciously bought into the insidious, rampant, and ongoing devaluation of black lives. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery. Is there tension and vulnerability in supporting both the police and the activists? Hell, yes. It’s the wilderness. But most of the criticism comes from people who are intent on forcing these false either/or dichotomies and shaming us for not hating the right people. It’s definitely messier taking a nuanced stance, but it’s also critically important to true belonging.

if racism isn’t structural – enforced by institutions, by unconscious bias, by the diminishment of its victims’ life chances – is it really racism?

In everyday terms, it is not racism that prompts a white shopper in a clothing store to go up to a random black or brown person who is also shopping and to ask for a sweater in a different size, or for a white guest at a party to ask a black or brown person who is also a guest to fetch them a drink, as happened to Barack Obama as a state senator, or even perhaps a judge to sentence a subordinate-caste person for an offense for which a dominant-caste person might not even be charged. It is caste or rather the policing of and adherence to the caste system. It’s the autonomic, unconscious, reflexive response to expectations from a thousand imaging inputs and neurological societal downloads that affix people to certain roles based upon what they look like and what they historically have been assigned to or the characteristics and stereotypes by which they have been categorized. No ethnic or racial category is immune to the messaging we all receive about the hierarchy, and thus no one escapes its consequences.

America didn’t start burning right now, and it is not burning because Black people are 'overreacting' or committing 'violence'. America has always been burning for many people. If you haven’t felt that America has always been burning, then you are – consciously or unconsciously – part of the structural, systemic, and calculated racism and marginalization committed against Blacks and other marginalized people in America. If you haven’t always felt that America was burning, you are part of the problem and you may want to consider joining the camp of those looking for solution to put an end to this nightmarish reality.

Bias is implicit and unconscious; I don’t expect to be aware of mine without a lot of ongoing effort.

Bias is implicit and unconscious; I don’t expect to be aware of mine without a lot of ongoing effort. • Giving us white people feedback on our racism is risky for people of color, so we can consider the feedback a sign of trust.

For white Americans, however, and anyone who has been part of a dominant culture around the globe, dominant-group socialization is normally not as obvious. Those living as part of a majority, dominant culture are less likely to be conscious of their own socialization. Rather than thinking of their own lives as being shaped by a peculiar context or culture, people who constitute the majority of a society are often unconscious of these realities. Individualistic frameworks prevent people from seeing that their viewpoints are not quite as original as they would like to believe.

For example, if I believe—consciously or unconsciously—that it is normal and appropriate for men to express anger but not women, I will have very different emotional responses to men’s and women’s expressions of anger. I might see a man who expresses anger as competent and in charge and may feel respect for him, while I see a woman who expresses anger as childish and out of control and may feel contempt for her. If I believe that only bad people are racist, I will feel hurt, offended, and shamed when an unaware racist assumption of mine is pointed out.

of conscious racial awareness as the tip of an iceberg, the superficial aspects of our racial socialization: our intentions (always good!) and what we are supposed to acknowledge seeing (nothing!). Meanwhile, under the surface is the massive depth of racist socialization: messages, beliefs, images, associations, internalized superiority and entitlement, perceptions, and emotions. Color-blind ideology makes it difficult for us to address these unconscious beliefs.

largely unconscious, and herein lies the deepest challenge—the defensiveness that ensues upon any suggestion of racial bias.4

Racial bias is largely unconscious, and herein lies the deepest challenge—the defensiveness that ensues upon any suggestion of racial bias.4 This defensiveness is classic white fragility because it protects our racial bias while simultaneously affirming our identities as open-minded.

I marched in the sixties.” Someone who tells me that they marched in the 1960s—like the person who tells me they know people of color—is telling me that they see racism as a simple matter of racial intolerance (which clearly they don’t have or they could not have tolerated marching alongside black people during the civil rights movement). They are also telling me that they believe that racism is uncomplicated and unchanging. Yet in the 1960s, we thought race was biological. We used terms like Oriental and colored. Nevertheless, in the light of an action they took more than fifty years ago, they see their racial learning as finished for life. Their action certifies them as free of racism, and there is no more discussion or reflection required. It also assumes that absolutely no racism—even unconsciously—was perpetrated toward blacks by well-meaning whites during the civil rights movement. Yet the testimony of black civil rights activists tells us otherwise. How many white people who marched in the 1960s had authentic cross-racial relationships with African Americans?

Color-blind ideology makes it difficult for us to address these unconscious beliefs. While the idea of color blindness may have started out as a well-intentioned strategy for interrupting racism, in practice it has served to deny the reality of racism and thus hold it in place.

Good white liberals tend to use the fact of a black middle class (sometimes unconsciously, but other times explicitly and consciously) to affirm their belief that the basic structure of liberal society is just and fair. In contrast to the black middle class, however, the existence of white trash threatens both white liberal ideals of opportunity and white liberal assumptions of openness to and acceptance of people who are different than oneself. White trash are not able to perform the same reassuring roles for white liberals as the black middle class, and so white liberals can tend to be more comfortable around black middle-class people than they are around white trash.

Racial bias is largely unconscious, and herein lies the deepest challenge—the defensiveness that ensues upon any suggestion of racial bias.4 This defensiveness is classic white fragility because it protects our racial bias while simultaneously affirming our identities as open-minded. Yes, it’s uncomfortable to be confronted with an aspect of ourselves that we don’t like, but we can’t change what we refuse to see.

A thought experiment is in order: If American blacks acted en masse like Asian Americans for ten years in all things relevant to economic success—if they had similar rates of school attendance, paying attention in class, doing homework and studying for exams, staying away from crime, persisting in a job, and avoiding out-of-wedlock childbearing—and we still saw racial differences in income, professional status, and incarceration rates, then it would be well justified to seek an explanation in unconscious prejudice. But as long as the behavioral disparities remain so great, the minute distinctions of the IAT are a sideshow. America has an appalling history of racism and brutal subjugation, and we should always be vigilant against any recurrence of that history. But the most influential sectors of our economy today practice preferences in favor of blacks. The main obstacles to racial equality at present lie not in implicit bias but in culture and behavior.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that the term “microaggression” emerged in popularity during the so-called post-racial era that some people assumed we’d entered with the election of the first Black president. The word “racism” went out of fashion in the liberal haze of racial progress—Obama’s political brand—and conservatives started to treat racism as the equivalent to the N-word, a vicious pejorative rather than a descriptive term. With the word itself becoming radioactive to some, passé to others, some well-meaning Americans started consciously and perhaps unconsciously looking for other terms to identify racism. “Microaggression” became part of a whole vocabulary of old and new words—like “cultural wars” and “stereotype” and “implicit bias” and “economic anxiety” and “tribalism”—that made it easier to talk about or around the R-word. I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term.

Once we understand the power of implicit bias, for example, we know that we must deepen rather than close off further reflection. Although deeper reflection won’t free us of unconscious inequitable treatment of others, it will get us closer than will outright denial.

Many of us see emotions as naturally occurring. But emotions are political in two key ways. First, our emotions are shaped by our biases and beliefs, our cultural frameworks. For example, if I believe—consciously or unconsciously—that it is normal and appropriate for men to express anger but not women, I will have very different emotional responses to men’s and women’s expressions of anger. I might see a man who expresses anger as competent and in charge and may feel respect for him, while I see a woman who expresses anger as childish and out of control and may feel contempt for her. If I believe that only bad people are racist, I will feel hurt, offended, and shamed when an unaware racist assumption of mine is pointed out. If I instead believe that having racist assumptions is inevitable (but possible to change), I will feel gratitude when an unaware racist assumption is pointed out; now I am aware of and can change that assumption. In this way, emotions are not natural; they are the result of the frameworks we are using to make sense of social relations. And of course, social relations are political. Our emotions are also political because they are often externalized; our emotions drive behaviors that impact other people.

If you unconsciously believe you are superior, then you will unconsciously believe that your worldview is the one that is superior, normal, right, and that it deserves to be at the center.

Viewing privilege as something that white people are just handed obscures the systematic dimensions of racism that must be actively and passively, consciously and unconsciously, maintained.

know that I have blind spots and unconscious investments in racism. My investments are reinforced every day in mainstream society. I did not set this system up, but it does unfairly benefit me, I do use it to my advantage, and I am responsible for interrupting it. I need to work hard to change my role in this system, but I can’t do it alone.

Racism is a multilayered system embedded in our culture. • All of us are socialized into the system of racism. • Racism cannot be avoided. • Whites have blind spots on racism, and I have blind spots on racism. • Racism is complex, and I don’t have to understand every nuance of the feedback to validate that feedback. • Whites are / I am unconsciously invested in racism. • Bias is implicit and unconscious; I don’t expect to be aware of mine without a lot of ongoing effort. • Giving us white people feedback on our racism is risky for people of color, so we can consider the feedback a sign of trust. • Feedback on white racism is difficult to give; how I am given the feedback is not as relevant as the feedback itself. • Authentic antiracism is rarely comfortable. Discomfort is key to my growth and thus desirable. • White comfort maintains the racial status quo, so discomfort is necessary and important. • I must not confuse comfort with safety; as a white person, I am safe in discussions of racism. • The antidote to guilt is action. • It takes courage to break with white solidarity; how can I support those who do? • I bring my group’s history with me; history matters. • Given my socialization, it is much more likely that I am the one who doesn’t understand the issue. • Nothing exempts me from the forces of racism. • My analysis must be intersectional (a recognition that my other social identities—class, gender, ability—inform how I was socialized into the racial system). • Racism hurts (even kills) people of color 24-7. Interrupting it is more important than my feelings, ego, or self-image.

Staff and faculty of color regularly play an additional role of caring for students of color who have often been the recipients of unconscious bias, racism, and microaggressions on campus.

My call to action goes well beyond asking you to pressure your recruiting team to hire a couple of token employees. That's easy and you've been doing that for years. My call to action is that you dig deeper and place focus on making the work environment sustainable for the minorities you introduce to your team. I'm challenging you to refrain from the habitual practice of listening only to the jaded opinions of people that you are more familiar with. Consider that, although you may be under the impression that your employees have strong ethics, morals and values, there is a possibility that they mat not be telling you the entire truth when speaking about the performance or demeanor of minorities. Furthermore, I challenge you to accept that racism, ageism, ableism, classism, sizeism, homophobia, etc., are real and shaping the semblance of your organization. Accepting that fact does not mean that people you work with and trust are bad people. It simply means that many of them are naïve, fearful, and more comfortable with pointing fingers at the innocent than they are with facing and addressing their own unconscious and damaging biases.

Emotions are political in two key ways. First, our emotions are shaped by our biases and beliefs, our cultural frameworks. For example, if I believe - consciously or unconsciously - that it is normal and appropriate for men to express anger but not women, I will have very different emotional response to men's and women's anger. [...] In this way, emotions are not natural; they are the result of the frameworks we are using to make sense of social relations. And of course, social relations are political. Our emotions are also political because they are often externalized; our emotions drive behaviors that impact other people.

Black people suffer poor mental health as a result of the grind of surviving in a space that seems to act against you, undermining you, pushing you aside, sometimes unconsciously, making you feel as if you’re living in a different reality. Rather than listen to what Black people have to say, they are shouted down, their experience is denied, and it becomes too exhausting to address the ignorance. This may be the most ‘open and tolerant’ country, but tolerance isn’t enough when it comes to racism. People need to call it out or at the very least acknowledge its existence or we will be speaking with a completely separate set of facts. Being challenged on the existence of racism is tiresome, psychologically debilitating, and deeply depressing. I’m not surprised that so many of us break down living here in the UK.

Individual racism, whether conscious or unconscious, gives greedy people the moral permission to exploit others in ways they never would with people with whom they empathized. Institutional racism of the kind that kept the management ranks of lenders and regulators mostly white furthered this social distance. And then structural racism both made it easy to prey on people of color due to segregation and eliminated the accountability when disparate impacts went unheeded. Lenders, brokers, and investors targeted people of color because they thought they could get away with it. Because of racism, they could.

For example, if I believe—consciously or unconsciously—that it is normal and appropriate for men to express anger but not women, I will have very different emotional responses to men’s and women’s expressions of anger. I might see a man who expresses anger as competent and in charge and may feel respect for him, while I see a woman who expresses anger as childish and out of control and may feel contempt for her. If I believe that only bad people are racist, I will feel hurt, offended, and shamed when an unaware racist assumption of mine is pointed out. If I instead believe that having racist assumptions is inevitable (but possible to change), I will feel gratitude when an unaware racist assumption is pointed out; now I am aware of and can change that assumption. In this way, emotions are not natural; they are the result of the frameworks we are using to make sense of social relations. And of course, social relations are political. Our emotions are also political because they are often externalized; our emotions drive behaviors that impact other people.

Racial resentment goes through government for us. For most of our history, the government was the racist. But many white people now believe, consciously or unconsciously, that the government has taken the other side and is now changing the ‘proper’ racial order through social spending, civil rights laws, and affirmative action. This makes the government untrustworthy. And so, racial resentment by whites and distrust of government are very highly correlated. And then distrust of government and not wanting government to do anything about climate change…

Individual racism, whether conscious or unconscious, gives greedy people the moral permission to exploit others in ways they never would with people with whom they empathized.

Hate crime and violent crime is something reprehensible perpetrated by other people, a small deviant class, mainly men – this, at least, is the commonly held view. But Miles (2003) argues that we must reckon fully and realistically with our barbaric evolutionary heritage; and Buss (2006) uses case study research to suggest that fantasising harm and death to others is extremely common. Freud would have agreed with such assessments of human nature, acknowledging that unconsciously, ‘safely’ repressed, we sometimes harbour destructive and taboo-breaking wishes not only towards enemies but also towards loved-ones and ourselves. Today’s ascendant coalition of groups opposing racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-religious views, and championing equality and human rights, want to abolish not only outward physical violence and its verbal scaffolding but also vocal and mental hatred. This amounts to an unrealistic and dangerous totalitarian agenda for the fantasised good, the mechanism for which is suppression not understanding. That we all have a barbarous dark side that can be triggered in certain circumstances is a thesis denied or ignored by many but recognised by so-called misanthropes, anthropathologists and DRs. Ironically, opponents of the concept of (often dark) human nature unwittingly force a mental illness status upon those who notice weird and hateful thoughts in their own heads and conclude that they are uniquely perverse and unacceptable individuals. In other words, denial breeds another layer of depression in the same way that sin-focused puritanical religions have caused inauthentic behaviour and created neurotic minds.

acknowledging advantage is only a first step, and this acknowledgment can be used in a way that renders it meaningless and allows us white people to exempt ourselves from further responsibility. For example, I have often heard whites dismissively say, “Just because of the color of my skin, I have privilege.” Statements like this describe privilege as if it’s a fluke—something that just happens to us as we move through life, with no involvement or complicity on our part. Critical race scholar Zeus Leonardo critiques the concept of white privilege as something white people receive unwittingly. He says that this concept is analogous to suggesting that people could walk through life with other people stuffing money into their pockets without any awareness or consent on the walker’s part. Leonardo challenges this conceptualization, which positions white privilege as innocence, by arguing that “for white racial hegemony to saturate everyday life, it has to be secured by a process of domination, or those acts, decisions, and policies that white subjects perpetrate on people of color.”19 Viewing privilege as something that white people are just handed obscures the systematic dimensions of racism that must be actively and passively, consciously and unconsciously, maintained.

I know that I have blind spots and unconscious investments in racism. My investments are reinforced every day in mainstream society. I did not set this system up, but it does unfairly benefit me, I do use it to my advantage, and I am responsible for interrupting it. I need to work hard to change my role in this system, but I can’t do it alone. This understanding leads me to gratitude when others help me.

Whites are / I am unconsciously invested in racism. Bias is implicit and unconscious; I don’t expect to be aware of mine without a lot of ongoing effort. Giving us white people feedback on our racism is risky for people of color, so we can consider the feedback a sign of trust. Feedback on white racism is difficult to give; how I am given the feedback is not as relevant as the feedback itself. Authentic antiracism is rarely comfortable. Discomfort is key to my growth and thus desirable. White comfort maintains the racial status quo, so discomfort is necessary and important. I must not confuse comfort with safety; as a white person, I am safe in discussions of racism. The antidote to guilt is action.

Experiments in limiting reproduction to the undesirable classes were unconsciously made in mediæval Europe under the guidance of the church. After the fall of Rome social conditions were such that all those who loved a studious and quiet life were compelled to seek refuge from the violence of the times in monastic institutions and upon such the church imposed the obligation of celibacy and thus deprived the world of offspring from these desirable classes. In the Middle Ages, through persecution resulting in actual death, life imprisonment and banishment, the free thinking, progressive and intellectual elements were persistently eliminated over large areas, leaving the perpetuation of the race to be carried on by the brutal, the servile and the stupid. It is now impossible to say to what extent the Roman Church by these methods has impaired the brain capacity of Europe, but in Spain alone, for a period of over three centuries from the years 1471 to 1781, the Inquisition condemned to the stake or imprisonment an average of 1,000 persons annually. During these three centuries no less than 32,000 were burned alive and 291,000 were condemned to various terms of imprisonment and other penalties and 17,000 persons were burned in effigy, representing men who had died in prison or had fled the country. No better method of eliminating the genius producing strains of a nation could be devised and if such were its purpose the result was eminently satisfactory, as is demonstrated by the superstitious and unintelligent Spaniard of to-day. A similar elimination of brains and ability took place in northern Italy, in France and in the Low Countries, where hundreds of thousands of Huguenots were murdered or driven into exile.

Deep down in the European unconscious has been hollowed out an excessively black pit where the most immoral instincts and unmentionable desires slumber. And since every man aspires to whiteness and light, the European has attempted to repudiate this primitive personality, which does its best to defens itself. When European civilisation came into contact with the black world, with these savages, everyone was in agreement that these block people were the essence of evil.

The fundamental task of fantasy is to transform an impossible satisfaction that no one could attain into a prohibited satisfaction that becomes unattainable due to the fantasized obstacle that prevents the subject from having its object. Fantasy plays the central role in the psyche because it performs this operation. Even though fantasy is primarily unconscious, it enables people to believe consciously in the possibility of a satisfaction that they cannot have. It allows them to come into touch with a transcendent impossibility that makes everyday life bearable. Through fantasy, one can imagine an enjoyment without lack, but this is possible only via the creation of an obstacle that bears responsibility for the failure to attain this enjoyment. This process enables one to enjoy the obstacle while believing oneself to be enjoying the prospect of having the desired object itself.

Not only does the immigrant perform work that citizens will not perform for a wage that they will not accept, according to the racist fantasy, the immigrant does so without acceding to the rules that govern the social order. The immigrant as an immigrant has the status of one who doesn’t belong to the social order. The social restrictions that apply to citizens don’t apply to immigrants, who have no clear place within the social order. Although being undocumented seems to carry nothing but disadvantages, from the perspective of the racist fantasy, it signifies the clear advantage of benefiting from the social order without being subjected to its laws. Undocumented immigrants have a much greater fantasmatic power due to their lack of documentation, which indicates how the law fails to sink its teeth into them. The more that immigrants become marginalized and fall outside the social order—the more they exist in an oppressed situation—the more they appear to partake in the enjoyment that the racist fantasy attributes to them. Far from eliminating their access to enjoyment, their oppressed status signifies their access to it in the racist fantasy.

White fragility. Coined by Robin DiAngelo (a white American woman), this term suggests that whites are systemically (not necessarily individually) racist, but because this is largely unconscious, when challenged, whites often become very uncomfortable and defensive.

Liberal antiracists [...] talk of "hate speech" and "hate crimes", on the assumption that oppresive cruelty is the behavioural expression of a hateful disposition - ignoring the corporate executives, asset managers, lawmakers, government officials, judges, police officers, prison guards, military personnel and immigration officers who, without attitudes of hatred, routinely and calmly operate infrastructures of racist violence, in the name of security and profit. By relocating racism to the unconscious mind, liberal antiracists end up absolving the institutions most responsible for racist practices.

Liberal antiracists [...] talk of "hate speech" and "hate crimes", on the assumption that oppresive cruelty is the behavioural expression of a hateful disposition - ignoring the corporate executives, asset managers, lawmakers, government officials, judges, police officers, prison guards, military personnel and immigration officers who, without attitudes of hatred, routinely and calmly operate infrastructures of racist violence, in the name of security and profit. By relocating racism to the unconscious mind, liberal antiracists end up absolving the institutions most responsible for racist practices.

But in spite of our alleged freedoms today, we cynical, postmodern subjects – finding ourselves overwhelmed by the injunction to transgress and the burden of choosing every aspect of our very existence – compensate for the decline in symbolic efficacy by voluntarily subjecting ourselves to ever new forms of constraint: in short, we demand that the Other act on our behalf. Instead of recognizing that Capital itself is the ultimate power of deterritorialization, we blame the disintegration of symbolic order on some (religious, racial, ethnic) Other. This “postmodern racism” is inherent to the multiculturalist and (allegedly) tolerant reduction of the sphere of politics proper to the clash of cultures. When all conflicts are presupposed to arise from cultural or ethnic differences, we not only miss the true causes of the conflict. More seriously, the pre- supposition functions so as to depoliticize all problems: the result is a cynical subject. This is why the resigned, postmodern subject of late capitalism views anyone with political principles as a dangerous fanatic. Moreover, as Žižek has argued in more recent writings, “the opposition between rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one.” In other words, democratic openness is based on exclusion, and right-wing populism and liberal tolerance are two sides of the same coin. This explains why there are forms of racism that involve a rejection of Muslims, for example, with the false claim that all Muslims are racist. This implicit moment of racism in liberal “tolerance” is also manifested in the way that the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy has led to the development of a new ideological formation, the universalization of the fantasy image of the helpless victim: “So the much-advertised liberal-democratic “right to difference” and anti-Eurocentrism appear in their true light: the Third World other is recognized as a victim – that is to say, in so far as he is a victim. The true object of anxiety is the other no longer prepared to play the role of victim – such another is promptly denounced as a “terrorist,” a “fundamentalist,” and so on. The Somalis, for example, undergo a true Kleinian splitting into a “good” and a “bad” object – on the one hand the good object: passive victims, suffering starving children and women; on the other the bad object: fanatical warlords who care more for their power or their ideological goals than for the welfare of their own people. The good other dwells in the anonymous passive universality of a victim – the moment we encounter an actual/active other, there is always something with which to reproach him: being patriarchal, fanatical, intolerant … (Metastases, p. 215) All of this supports Žižek’s initial, provocative claim, which at first seemed so outrageous, that unconscious enjoyment was the cause of the West’s indecision during the Bosnian war. It is the enjoyment provided by ideological formations – such as the fantasy image of the victim – that explains the failure of Western intervention in the Bosnian conflict.

...we might try to assuage our loneliness and fears by sleeping with partners we don't love or respect -- sometimes men who won't even remember our names -- as we use sex addictively to fill the emotional hole. But we never walk away from sex Scott free. Sex is more personal to us than to men, and there's a reason for that. The results of preliminary research suggests that when we have orgasms, our bodies release oxytocin, the same chemical that's produced during breast-feeding, and that heightens feelings of bonding. As [Niravi] Payne explains in The Language of Fertility, which is coauthored with Brenda Richardson, her work is based on research that validates thoughts and beliefs can affect functioning in cells, tissues and organs. In recent decades, scientists have learned that much of human perception is based not on information flowing into the brain from the external world, but on what the brain based on previous experience, expects to happen next. That means if we unconsciously believe that sex is "shameful" or something to be feared, that belief can be reflected in our reproductive organs by throwing our hormonal functioning, which regulates pregnancy, or in our immune system, which governs our ability to maintain a pregnancy, or even in our menstrual flow, which if malfunctioning can lead to fibroid tumors. Like all feelings, sexual feelings are energy, and when energy is suppressed, it builds and burst out in destructive ways. Clinical psychologist Darlene Powell Hopson has said she teaches her clients an invocation that in, part, she learned from fellow author Iyanla Vanzant: 'Dear God, I love you and being your child. You made me a sexual being and I want to experience closeness and fulfillment with my partner. My soul yearns for the pleasure and satisfaction of being spiritually and physically intimate with my partner....Please continue to remain with me and in me, forever.

A white person can date a Black person and still be racist. Because there’s levels to that sh*t. Like a lasagna.” I frown but Shu says, “Stay with me. So, on the top, that cheesy layer, that’s what you can see clearly. Hate speech, mad looks, and violence. Obvious stuff you can’t ignore. But all them layers underneath, the ones that are harder to see, microaggression and unconscious bias? Giving your white “girlfriend jewelry, boat rides, and meet-and-greets with the family, but your Black girlfriend pasta in your house? Racism, hun.

She then adds that if we live in America, we are racism-breathers, and it doesn’t matter what color we are. We don’t try to be, we aren’t usually conscious of the racism we’ve breathed. We just go about our regular lives. We are so unconscious of these realities that we seldom see how even our language is embedded with racist overtones

Racial bias is largely unconscious, and herein lies the deepest challenge—the defensiveness that ensues upon any suggestion of racial bias.

All I am left thinking is: What lesson did I have to be taught? Not to be a concerned individual? Not to care about someone else's innocent life, the boy lying unconscious across from me? Not to care about my own life? Not to be a member of my own race?

I thought I had it all figured out. I thought of racism as an inanimate, immortal system, not as a living, recognizable, mortal disease of cancer cells that we could identify and treat and kill. I considered the system as essential to the United States and the Constitution. At times, I thought White people covertly operated the system, fixed it to benefit the total White community at the expense of the total Black community. The construct of covert institutional racism opens American eyes to racism and, ironically, closes them, too. Separating the overt individual from the covert institutional veils the specific policy choices that cause racial inequities, policies made by specific people. Covering up the specific policies and policymakers prevents us from identifying and replacing the specific policies and policy makers. We become unconscious to racist policymakers and policies as we lash out angrily at the abstract bogeyman of "the system.

Privilege theory offers the liberal multicultural subject a phantasmatic reality. It gives that subject the tools to name society’s bad apples: they are easily discernable; they are those who don’t check their privilege, blind to the social and cultural power that they undeservedly enjoy. And if privilege theory calls on you to curtail the pleasures of your own privilege, to willingly renounce your culturally given claims on the world, you are rewarded with “libidinal profit,” with what Lacan calls a “surplus-enjoyment,” an enjoyment-in-sacrifice or enjoyment-inconfession. Suffering—the feeling of guilt from realizing that you can never fully eradicate your privilege (again, privilege theory concedes that “one can no more renounce privilege than one can stop breathing”), that you are enjoying the fruits of an impure liberalism, that you’re taking up the space of someone more deserving, and so on—and exhaustion— the emotional cost for your unflinching vigilance in naming racism and denouncing prejudice wherever it appears—ironically become signs not of your defeat but of your self-enlightenment, moral righteousness, and true commitment to social justice. There is thus a kind of illicit satisfaction—an unconscious enjoyment—not only in exposing the blind spots of others, in the rhetorical disciplining of others, but in your own self-discipline, in your perceived suffering and exhaustion as well, amounting to an abstract testimony to the heroism of whiteness (“another self-glorification in which whiteness is equated with moral rectitude,” as Butler puts it) and the progress of multicultural liberalism: it’s not perfect, but we’re getting there . Along the way, privilege theory redeems its practitioners: since its biopolitical logic tends to individualize racism— check your privilege—your self-check exempts you from the charge of racism. It is fundamentally the problem of individual others (typically that of the less educated, white blue collar workers), concealing society’s “civil racism,” the pervading, naturalized racism of everyday liberal life. In contrast, psychoanalysis compels the liberal multicultural subject to confront a starker reality. For psychoanalysis, the routinized and ritualized call to check your privilege appears too convenient; it enables the liberal multicultural subject to diminish his or her guilt ( I ’m doing something personally about implicit biases) without needing to take on the sociopolitical framework directly. If privilege theorists are pressed, they will gladly confess that they know that it is not enough to denounce the unearned privileges of others without simultaneously attending to the networks of power relations that sustain such advantages. And yet in their active scholarly activist lives, they act as if it were enough, displaying the psychoanalytic structure of fetishistic disavowal (I know very well, but all the same). They maintain a split attitude toward antiracism. They know very well that denouncing white privilege is necessary but not sufficient, yet they don’t really believe that this critico-gesture does not accomplish the task at hand. Privilege theory, we might say, “wants social change with no actual change.” Rather than addressing the social antagonisms immanent to capitalism, it misapprehends the framework (and its enablement of racism). Privilege theory typically only sees social structures as the sum of their individual parts, their individual consciences. At its base level, it provides you with the fantasy of intervention and action; it offers you criticism without critique . For the proponents of privilege theory, social change follows the gradual and predictable path of reform.