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“This is the sort of thing that was probably meant by the phrase 'institutional racism' with reference to the police...a lot of the criticism of that came from people who thought that every police officer was thus being called a racist, but it was different from that...soldiers in a regiment are imbued with a sort of invisible ...feeling, which is again picked up by a hundred little example, some too small to see consciously...young officers see and hear their elders and superiors using language or making jokes, or overlooking remarks that they make, which have a racist tendency. The general assumption is that that's the way we, the force, the canteen, the people in uniform - us - that's the way we see things. It all resonates and gets amplified. And because a lot of this is subliminal and unconscious and never actually put into 'racist' words...it's easy to deny that it exists, and it is even easy to believe that it doesn't.” — Philip Pullman