When Funding Depends on Race: A Question of Equality, Identity, and Meaning

Projection, Symbol, and the Aesthetics of Moral Perception

There is a recurring pattern in how societies think: we do not perceive the world only as it is, but also through symbolic layers that precede rational interpretation. Meaning is often assigned before analysis begins.

In psychology, this is known as projection. In Jungian terms, projection occurs when internal material—fear, guilt, ideals, aspiration—is placed onto external objects. Over time, these projections can stop being individual distortions and become cultural patterns, especially when reinforced by institutions, language, and media.

In modern moral discourse, particularly in Western contexts, this process becomes visible when historical events are no longer only studied as history, but are symbolically compressed into simplified categories. Groups begin to function less as collections of individuals and more as carriers of moral meaning.

This does not require conscious intent. Large systems do not need coordination to produce symbolic outcomes. They accumulate patterns through history, institutional incentives, and cultural pressure. Over time, this creates imbalances in how history is emotionally processed.

Symbolic Perception and Color

Across art, religion, and philosophy, black and white repeatedly appear as symbolic opposites:

light and shadow
presence and absence
known and unknown
fullness and emptiness
visibility and concealment

In visual perception, white corresponds to the full presence of visible light, where all wavelengths are reflected together. Black corresponds to the absence of reflected light, where visual information is not returned to the eye.

These are not social categories. They are perceptual conditions that have existed far longer than modern identity systems.

But humans do something very consistent: we extend perception into meaning. We turn optical conditions into symbolic frameworks.

White becomes associated with totality, purity, or wholeness because it contains everything at once. As the combination of all visible wavelengths, it can symbolically become any one of them. Like a blank canvas, white readily accepts projection because it already contains the full spectrum from which any visible image emerges.

Black becomes associated with absence, fear, or unknowability because it contains no visible return. Where visual information is withheld, the mind must supply its own explanations. Throughout human history, darkness concealed what could not yet be seen, measured, or understood. Before scientific knowledge reduced many of these uncertainties, the unknown often became a source of fear, suspicion, or mythmaking. In some cases, that fear of the unknown contributed to the dehumanization of people, places, and ideas associated with what was perceived as dark and unfamiliar.

The important point is not whether these associations are “correct,” but that they emerge from observable properties of light and the meanings humans have consistently derived from them across cultures and centuries.

Projection and Cultural Simplification

Once symbolic thinking becomes dominant, it begins to replace direct perception.

Moral ideals are projected onto one group.
Historical guilt is projected onto another.
Fear is projected onto symbolic “voids.”
Virtue is projected onto symbolic “wholeness.”

At that point, people are no longer seen as individuals first. They are seen as representatives of meaning.

That is the core distortion: symbolic categories begin replacing human perception.

Institutions and Symbolic Correction

This dynamic does not remain abstract. It enters institutions.

Collective guilt, symbolic association, and moral overcorrection influence how systems are designed.

Not in a deliberate or malicious way—but in the way societies try to stabilize themselves after periods of perceived imbalance.

A society becomes aware of historical injustice.
Institutions attempt correction.
Policies are designed to adjust outcomes.
Categories become part of the mechanism for repair.

This is where race-specific funding and similar systems appear.

The stated purpose is to correct historical exclusion—meaning that if groups were previously denied access, targeted support is introduced to rebalance opportunity in the present.

Structurally, this is understandable as a corrective system operating at scale.

But symbolically, something more subtle happens: the same categorical framework used in the past to separate people is still being used in the present to repair the separation.

So the structure changes direction, but not shape.

And this raises a difficult question:

If the goal is to move beyond historical categorization, why do modern systems still rely on categorization as their primary tool of repair?

Especially when many institutions simultaneously claim to value individuals over identity.

Even the basic structures of modern life reflect this tension. Applications, forms, and systems routinely ask for race, gender, age, and other demographic markers—even when the stated ideal is equal individual treatment.

The result is a contradiction embedded into everyday structure: we say individuals matter most, while continuously organizing people through group classification.

The Deeper Pattern

The deeper issue is not intent.

It is that symbolic systems persist even when their moral direction changes.

Projection does not disappear when societies become more self-aware. It often becomes more refined. More embedded. More institutional.

And when symbolic frameworks become embedded in institutions, they begin to feel like reality itself.

an invitation

If there is a necessary shift, it is not the denial of history, and not the rejection of correction.

It is something simpler and harder: a return to perception before category.

A constant resistance against the automatic conversion of individuals into symbolic groups or meanings.

Because once symbolic categories become the primary way people are seen—whether as privilege, guilt, harm, or redemption—then even well-intended systems begin to reproduce the very problem they are trying to solve.

The question is not whether societies will use categories.

They will.

The question is whether we can build systems that remember categories are tools, not identities—and whether we can design moral structures that do not lose the individual inside the symbol.