• If one believes that character is determined by race, one may conclude that members of other races are inherently "oppressors," while all members of one's own race are necessarily "oppressed." (This world-view, of course, should not be confused with the realistic perception of authentic instances of racially based injustice.) Ubiquitous "oppression" then seems to excuse a person from the positive responsibility of taking actions to improve his or her life and to develop a sense of personal efficacy. One need not learn to overcome one's failures, since those failures are the consequence of oppression, which is beyond one's control. In fact, they are no longer regarded as failures at all and hence present no threat to one's sense of self-worth.

The pervasiveness of racist thinking in our era is reflected in its common language. Consider, for example, the oft-repeated and seldom disputed expression: "Ms. Jones is a minority." Not only is an entire human being reduced to just one characteristic, but that characteristic is not even an actual feature of Ms. Jones—merely a statistical observation about the size of a category of people that includes her, compared with the rest of mankind. (Of course, it could be argued that every individual constitutes a "minority"; this meaning, however, is clearly not intended by the expression, which seeks to differentiate Ms. Jones from other individuals.) The identification of Ms. Jones as a "minority" reveals a fundamental metaphysical confusion, a conflation of real entities with abstract categories, comparable to declaring: "Mr. Smith is a human race."     

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