What a society refuses to investigate reveals its self-image

Evidence

I do not make this assertion only to deplore it, although I will do some of that below. Nor do I claim that the culture war over affirmative action is unique; on issues ranging from a national bank in the 1830s to communists in the State Department in the 1950s, Americans have always become passionately concerned about social “crises” that in fact matter little to their daily lives. Instead, I want to explore the culture war over affirmative action for a more analytic reason: comparing what we believe about affirmative action with what we know and what we have chosen not to find out tells us a great deal about Americans’ hopes, fears, and self-images. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1967

Categorization

• SEED: A reusable investigative frame: what a culture ‘chooses not to find out’ is diagnostic. Could be applied to any contested topic as an essay structure.
• XREF: connects to: Every dominant image of the human is defined against the possibilities it excludes — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 162