People who resist the label racist often do so not because they oppose injustice, but because it conflicts with how they see themselves.
They tend to think of themselves as decent. Polite. Fair. People who love their families and treat others well in everyday life. So when racism enters the conversation, it feels like a personal attack rather than an examination of systems or choices.
That reaction comes from a misunderstanding of what racism is.
Racism is not about manners or individual niceness. It is prejudice backed by power—the power to enforce, exclude, and decide whose lives are protected, whose suffering is tolerated, and whose humanity is negotiable. It shows up not just in attitudes, but in outcomes.
Once you understand that, the contradiction becomes clear.
You can deeply love the people closest to you and still support or excuse systems that harm others. Affection for those you love does not outweigh the humanity of those you will never meet. Your feelings and intentions do not supersede other people’s right to live, move freely, be safe, and be treated as fully human.
A good person does not make peace with harm simply because it doesn’t reach their own household. Moral goodness requires equal concern for human life and dignity without exception.
Moral Goodness Requires Equal Regard for Human Life
Every ethical framework, whether religious, philosophical, or secular, rests on the same premise: human beings possess equal moral value. You can disagree about policy and debate economics, but the moment you accept that one group deserves fewer rights, less protection, or diminished concern due to their race, you abandon all morality.
This is not about intentions. It is about outcomes.
For example, arrest rates and conviction rates are not the same thing, yet they are often treated as if they are. Black and brown Americans are arrested at higher rates across many categories, even though conviction rates do not show corresponding differences in guilt. In other words, contact with the criminal legal system reflects who is policed, not who is more criminal.
One of the clearest illustrations comes from research using traffic-stop data analyzed by the Stanford Open Policing Project. The study found that when police officers stopped cars during daylight, when a driver’s race was more visible, Black and brown drivers were stopped at higher rates. After dark, when officers could not easily see who was inside the vehicle, those racial disparities significantly decreased. The behavior on the road didn’t change. Visibility did.
These are outcomes. They are measurable, repeatable, and documented. And they persist regardless of whether the individual officer believes themselves to be fair, polite, or well-intentioned.
The Myth of Superiority
An identity built on superiority is fragile by design.
And fragility, when threatened, doesn’t produce strength. It produces fear.
Let me explain:
When a child is praised for being smart, they learn that their value is fixed (i.e., something they either have or don’t have). Over time, this rigid principle makes them cautious. They avoid challenge and protect the label rather than risk failure.
However, when a child is praised for being hardworking, something different happens. Effort becomes the point. Growth is expected. Failure is survivable because there are any number of other ways to overcome the obstacle and none of them involve the child being labeled as less of anything. These children tend to stretch, adapt, evolve, and improve.
Now apply that framework outward.
Any belief system that tells people they are superior by default, without effort, accountability, or growth, teaches the same lesson as praising “smartness.” It encourages entitlement, breeds fragility, and most notably, all but guarantees stagnation. In their minds, there is nothing to necessarily build upon, only something to defend.
This is the part rarely acknowledged: racism does not make people strong.
It makes them dependent on inherited identity instead of earned capability.
A worldview that says “I am above you by nature” is not a display of confidence.
It is insecurity wrapped in detrimental delusion.
Racism & It’s Hold on American Politics Today
In modern U.S. politics, racism rarely announces itself openly. It works through language that sounds neutral while delivering predictably unequal results.
Phrases like “law and order,” “tough on crime,” “real Americans,” or “border security” are almost always framed as targeting criminals, not communities. But in practice, these policies are applied broadly through over-policing, surveillance, and administrative barriers that disproportionately disrupt Black and brown lives, even when no crime has occurred.
The pattern is familiar. As Black and brown communities make gains in education, income, political participation, or professional representation, those gains are reframed as threats rather than progress. Increased visibility becomes suspicion. Advancement is treated as encroachment. And measures supposedly aimed at “bad actors” end up slowing momentum for entire groups.
This is especially stark in employment, housing, and policing outcomes, where people of color are routinely required to demonstrate more, more credentials, more compliance, more restraint, for the same opportunities and leniency. When progress finally appears despite those barriers, it is not celebrated. It is policed.
These policies are often defended as pragmatic or necessary. But, morality isn’t measured by intent claims or branding. It’s measured by impact.
If your political choices consistently undermine the progress of specific racial groups and you accept that harm as collateral damage in the name of “order, ” you are not practicing goodness. You are practicing selective empathy..
The Unavoidable Conclusion
Racism fails on every level.
It fails morally, because it denies equal human worth.
It fails psychologically, because it trades growth for entitlement.
It fails practically, because it weakens the very people who cling to it.
We are not here to perfect our self-image. We are here to recognize ourselves in one another. To understand, at some point, that I am you; you are me. That what we do to others through action, inaction, or willful ignorance, we ultimately do to those we love most.
Harm doesn’t stay contained. It travels. It shows up in our families, our children, our communities, and our future. And when all of this is said and done, that truth will be revealed plainly in every excuse for cruelty, every rationalization for indifference, every moment we chose comfort over conscience.
Regardless of religious affiliation, this is the lesson Jesus sought to teach—not performative kindness or moral theater, but radical recognition: the understanding that love, dignity, and responsibility are not reserved for some and to be earned by others. Performative goodness is not the mission; it is an invitation to miss your calling and repeat the same lessons generationally until they are finally fully learned.
You cannot build moral character on self-proclaimed (or violently imposed) dominance.
You cannot grow and evolve while insisting others are beneath you.
You can be racist…..or you can be good.
But, you cannot be both.
And eventually, willing or not, we all come to learn why.
Lence in Layers 