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a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can then do what you please.”

Arthur Schopenhauer in his aptly titled Studies in Pessimism: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

Part of the problem stems from the fact that facts, even a lot of facts, do not constitute reality. Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions. Reality is personal.

How happy to see lightning and not think, “Time is fleeting!” —BASHO

Audre Lorde eloquently addressed her thoughts on white guilt at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in 1981: I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of actio

“Because the new racial climate in America forbids the open expression of racially based feelings, views, and positions, when whites discuss issues that make them uncomfortable, they become almost incomprehensible.”7 Probing forbidden racial issues results in verbal incoherence—digressions, long pauses, repetition, and self-corrections.

These self-defense claims work on multiple levels. They identify the speakers as morally superior while obscuring the true power of their social positions. The claims blame others with less social power for their discomfort and falsely describe that discomfort as dangerous. The self-defense approach also reinscribes racist imagery. By positioning t