White people who responded angrily to my letter appear to have assumed that when it came to their racism, the racism that they rejected, they were able to ascertain whether or not they were racist through a sincere act of introspection. As one reader wrote, “Yancy doesn’t know my heart.”50 Given the moral investment that white people place in the rhetoric of a “color-blind” United States, despite their embeddedness within systemic white racist practices, and the social stigma that they feel when labeled racist, I would argue, with Ann Berlak, that “introspection as ordinarily understood is
...more
