Deep Denial Quotes

“Despite the current reality that racism continues to permeate the national consciousness and its structural arrangement, we must keep striving for the elusive goal of racial equity. There is no other choice. Either we challenge and transform these current white-dominated institutions so our nation can become one in which everyone’s humanity is recognized and affirmed, or racism will destroy us.”
― David Billings, Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life

“White supremacy is a psychological state as well as an ideology or political platform. White people find it difficult to follow black leadership or take directions from people of color in general, yet most of us deny this is so. White supremacy is a cultural phenomenon expressed most dramatically through our institutions and our understandings of what constitutes truth and societal norms. Yet many if not most whites deny that white culture even exists. Thus white supremacy persists.”
― David Billings, Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life

“A web of self-interests among the economic elite, the academy and media, sanctioned and legitimized by the power of the state, sustains white privilege. This unspoken preference for white is what has held poor and working class whites in support of an arrangement that does not serve their best interests — except the self-interest of being white in a race-constructed nation. This social contract has worked since the founding of the republic.”
― David Billings, Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life

“My Christian faith has always been important to me and has usually served me well. Before the church (the white church in my case) was taken over by its most conservative elements and before a literal interpretation of the Bible became de rigueur in some circles, the mainline churches set the bar for Christian orthodoxy; their basic liberal theology held sway over its national reputation and agenda. This would change over the years until today the church is seen as basically a reactionary and even exploitative force, more associated with anti-abortion than civil rights.”
― David Billings, Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life

“My classmates stood and cheered when President Kennedy’s assassination was announced over the school’s intercom. I was in the eleventh grade in Helena, Arkansas in 1963. Even then, the cheers seemed rehearsed. How could teenagers express such rank emotion from something so vile and tragic? Was this something they had heard at home —“someone should shoot the son-of-a-bitch”? Just the year before, we had cheered the President for standing up to the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis. The crisis was the threatening prospect of Soviet nuclear missiles ninety miles from the US shoreline. Kennedy had backed down the Russian premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Who knows what really happened? Now, we welcomed his brain being splintered by a rifle bullet next to his wife. A lone gunman did it. The Kennedys were for “civil rights.” This is the reason we cheered. Anyone“for civil rights” should have his head blown off. No one expressly said it, but I knew it. There were only two things for which we cheered so raucously back then: either a victory by the Arkansas Razorbacks (or, in my case, the Ole Miss Rebels) in a football game, or the defeat — in this case the murder — of a suspected civil rights leader. No international intrigue like missiles in a communist Cuba would have done it. Civil Rights. That was the reason. Later, we would say the same when John Kennedy’s brother, Robert, was killed. The Kennedys were for civil rights. That’s what got them killed.”
― David Billings, Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life

“Bible study is something I grew up with, but I had never heard the Bible taught from a social justice perspective. For me it was always used to justify segregation. I loved this new approach and so I would for the rest of my life.”
― David Billings, Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life

“we are a nation that grows more and more a-historical as the years pass. This failure to educate children — both white children and children of color — about the nation’s racial history further isolates whites from people of color and mis-educates everyone at the same time. For children of color not telling the truth leaves them unable to understand and explain the day-to-day discrimination that still occurs. This anger thus turns inward and becomes an internalized rage affecting both their own image of themselves and of others who look like them. White children on the other hand feel no connection to or responsibility for the many manifestations of white racial superiority in US history. If the history books absolve present day whites from any historical culpability in the nation’s race-constructed society, cries for legal remedies such as affirmative action, much less reparations, come across as cynical and self-serving on the part of black people.”
― David Billings, Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life