Racial beliefs are learned in a world not of our own making

Evidence

So how do we start to change our racial habits? It’s not easy. We enter a world not of our own making. People already have a sense of what is good and bad, what is appropriate and inappropriate. Tradition and history matter. Values, which go beyond our individual desires, matter. We learn this race stuff, and in some ways we have little choice. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 168

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes that racial habits are inherited dispositions shaped by tradition, not chosen positions — the core of the concept as distinct from conscious prejudice.
• XREF: connects to: Denying race as fiction is a reaction against imposed being; Children absorb their teachers’ racism through internalized pedagogies of observation — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 244; the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”