A Critical Race Approach to Systemic Inequity

This book explores and explains the cognitive basis of American systemic inequity and demonstrates that across all human societies and throughout human history systemic inequity has always existed. Humans are evolutionarily wired to create hierarchies in society, whether based on race, like in America, or on the caste system, as in India. These hierarchies exist because humans involuntarily reframe reality and this reframing not only prevents permanent depression but it renders systemic inequity invisible and results in the inequity presenting as moral, desirable, and just.

This book illustrates this reality by carefully dismantling the cognitive illusions that undergird American exceptionalism and meritocracy. The result is a disorienting and painful reveal of an American reality based almost entirely on systemic inequity. The dilemma the book develops and explores is that the identical reframing mechanisms that render systemic inequity normative and moral are also essential for human societies to exist and for our position as an apex species on the planet.

Dismantling systemic inequity therefore is a much more difficult task than most currently understand. It has nothing to do with changing individual attitudes but rather it requires a complete and disruptive revision of what we currently understand as humanity.