The Ultimate Act of Self-Deception.

Stop lying to yourself. Drop the comfortable delusion that you are "beyond" race or that your heart is perfectly clean, because it isn't. Every single person on this planet is carrying the weight of implicit bias—that quiet, insidious, subconscious rot that dictates how you move through the world without you even realizing it. It is the bias you don’t think you’re practicing, yet you do it every single day.

​Look at how people navigate their own cities. There are neighborhoods people won't enter because they are "predominantly Black," and there are Black people who feel a justified, defensive tension the moment they enter a "middle-class white" enclave. Both points of view are a failure of our shared humanity, yet we allow these invisible borders to dictate our lives. We see it on the bus or the subway. A person sits down and feels a spike of adrenaline because of a group of teenagers from another race laughing; they might claim to be the most "anti-racist" soul on earth, but their pulse is telling a different, uglier story. And the same applies to the person sitting across from a group of elitist children in private school uniforms, feeling that wall of exclusion and class-based resentment go up.

​The moment you point this out, the shields go up. People get indignant. They shout, "That’s not me!" That is total bullshit. If you are talking to a colleague of a different race, are you truly, 100% unaware of their skin color? Of course not. If you had to pick people out of a lineup, your brain would be categorizing them instantly, even those whose heritage is a complex map of the world. To say otherwise is to be a liar. We are kidding ourselves if we think we are always aware of when we are being racist. Saying we "know" our own hearts is the ultimate act of self-deception.

​This is exactly why the crusade against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is so fundamentally dishonest. People scream that these programs are "unfair" or that "we should all just be equal." That demand for a "colorblind" meritocracy is the peak of implicit bias. You demand a level playing field while refusing to acknowledge the centuries of systemic theft and discrimination that haven't just disappeared because you decided to stop looking at them. You ignore the history, you ignore the generational struggle, and then you have the audacity to call the remedy "unfair."

​We are never going to reach a state of true human connection as long as we keep grouping ourselves into silos or debating the basic necessity of equity. We need to reach a position of radical, painful honesty where we look through that cultural lens and see ourselves for what we truly are: biased, flawed, and conditioned by a broken world. The only way to break the fever is to stop seeing the "category" and start seeing the human being. If you spent more time in the realms of others—sharing meals, sharing lives, and existing in spaces where you are the minority—you might actually see the labels start to dissolve. But as long as you deny the bias exists, you are contributing to a sick, stagnant global culture. Acknowledging the rot is the only way to cut it out. Anything else is just a comfortable, cowardly lie.