Belief in black resilience justifies indifference to black suffering

Evidence

This isn’t a matter of racial prejudice. It stems from the belief that African Americans have been made resilient by racism. So black people can endure more pain than others. This can help us understand the deafening silence about the suffering and pain caused by the Great Black Depression. Racial habits render it invisible. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 167

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives a concrete mechanism distinguishing racial habit from prejudice: this is not animus but a belief in resilience that licenses silence about suffering.
• XREF: Connects to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and the ‘superhuman blackness’ trope, and to contemporary debates about black pain being minimized in medicine.