Richards' shattered demeanor and heartfelt repentance leaves us with what I shall call Kramer's Conundrum: How can someone who spews racial epithets genuinely believe he is not a racist? The answer is to be found in the difference between our conscious and unconscious attitudes and our public and private thoughts.
Consciously and publicly, Richards is probably not a racist. But unconsciously and privately, he is. So am I. So are you.
(..)
The insidiousness of racism is because of the fact that it arises out of the deep recesses of our unconscious. We may be unaware of it, yet it lurks there.
How do we know this? One indication is the Implicit Association Test, developed by Harvard scientists, which asks subjects to pair words and concepts. The more closely associated the words and concepts are, the quicker the response to them will be in the key-pressing sorting task (try it yourself at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ ).
(..)
Richards' sin was his deed; his thoughts are the sin of all humanity. Only when all people are considered to be members of one global in-group (in principle if not in practice) can we begin to attenuate these out-group associations. But it won't be easy. Vigilance is the watchword of both freedom and dignity.
We should accept Richards' apology for losing his temper and acting out those hateful thoughts. Perhaps we also ought to thank him for having the courage to confess in public what far too many of us still harbor in private, often in our unconscious minds. As the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote: "Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind."
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