Even committed antiracists remain shaped by inherited racial reflexes

Evidence

I am trying to establish the outlines of an understanding of myself in regard to what was fated to be the continuing crisis in my life, the crisis of racial awareness—the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak. (Emphasis added.) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 172

Categorization

• DEFINE: Glaude’s quoted definition (from Ellison, per the emphasis) that racial habits are reflexive and linguistic in depth, afflicting even the anti-racist — crucial to distinguishing habits from prejudice since one can disavow prejudice and still carry habits.