The Banality of Bigotry

… To be blunt, racism is not typically dramatic and ostentatious. It is most often banal—a mundane, omnipresent fact of life that is embedded in the daily habits and routines of our society. Despite the rhetoric that likens prejudice to a violent assault, racism is, in its most consequential form, more like gravity—something so routine it barely registers, but which affects everything. Racial injustice is perpetuated, not by monsters devoted to atrocity but by typical people doing typical things, each one a small part of a larger machine that grinds on heedless of moral consequences. CONT.

Richard Thompson Ford (Stanford Law School), The American Interest