Discussions of social cohesion always place particular import in the “trust” of the citizenry in state institutions, as well as the “trust” between different demographic groups. Appeals to these people for trust ignores the experiences of those potentially threatened by racism—corporally through rightwing violence, verbally through representation in the mass media, or existentially through unequal allocation of resources by discriminatory markets. Trust always signifies that those who would trust must extend beyond the realm of their own knowledge or experience, but not necessarily that they should act against their own better knowledge.
