Racial habits are inherited racism encoded in accumulated ordinary decisions

Evidence

In this sense, racial habits are our inheritance: they contain the history of white supremacy that has shaped and continues to shape this country. They are the millions of accumulated decisions that make racial inequality an inextricable part of what it means to be American. If we are to undo them (at least some of them), something dramatic must happen. And this is one reason the protests in Ferguson and Baltimore were so important. They forced us to confront our racial habits—to question how we police in this country and to see how black people are criminalized. In effect, they unsettled the racial sediment, and whether we were in the streets or not, agreed with the protests or not, we found ourselves, if just for a moment, examining the ugly reality of our racial habits. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 174

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition anchoring Glaude’s concept of ‘racial habits’ as accumulated micro-decisions carrying white-supremacist history, distinct from discrete prejudiced acts.
• XREF: connects to: Everyday racism links small recurring injustices to macrostructural racial hierarchies — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1455