Racial habits that demean Black people also damage white people and drive public policy

Evidence

Racial habits distort the character of those who benefit from them. Stereotypes and the stigmatization of black people fortify a particular idea of white people as somehow better than others and as representative of what is best about America. Those racial habits damage white people just as they do black people. And they don’t stay in people’s heads or shape only individual lives—they drive public policy. For example, the soul of America is scarred as we incarcerate a generation of black and brown people. We warehouse them in prisons, where people generate profits from them. And we have produced a culture and climate of fear—white fear of young black men and women—that justifies our indifference. A revolution of value attacks that culture at its root by changing our idea of the value of white and black people—insisting that white lives do not matter more than any other life in this country. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 549

Categorization

• DEFINE: Glaude builds toward his definition of the value gap and what a ‘revolution of value’ would require.