“Hey, how do I look today?” a friend asked. 

“You look amazing!!”, his friend responds, even though he didn’t like it at all. A white lie. White lies are told by everyone and every day. We use these lies to make people feel good about themselves or to just solve a problem quickly, but white lies are still lying. Telling people false truths no matter how small can lead to bigger problems as to feeding their emotions or delusions. White lies help in some ways, but they always lead down a road where a consequence awaits you. White lies are like Jenga blocks, you can build them up as high as you want, but as soon as you make the wrong move or mistake everything comes tumbling down. For example, in the play “Othello” by William Shakespeare, one of the characters, Emilia, steals Desdemona’s handkerchief and says she doesn’t know where it is, and gives it to Iago. White lies that Emilia told to Desdemona are lies that we tell to people we know everyday. We lie to benefit ourselves, and tend to never think of the following consequences. Something similar to white lies is the Dunning Kruger Effect, the more you are disconnected from the topic or something the more you seem to think you know about it, and are actually conscious of it. Talking to a new person or someone that you’re not personally close with can cause awkward conversations to be created, and white lies are how some people solve those problems. But with white lies it can sometimes build on something that shouldn’t be built on, like encouraging something that makes a person look bad even though you know it looks bad, or even thinking you know a topic in class and saying the wrong thing to get them to stop asking for answers. White lies are always things we say that just slip out of our mouths when talking to people and it can be a little bit racist without us knowing. We sometimes stereotype different people and those little lies that we don’t mean about a specific ethnicity stacks on another. Which then leads to even worse things we say because we think it’s fine, since we said it so much it just seems ok in our mind. But since the people you say those white lies too can also be a part of that trend and encourage the same thing. Which causes racism to slowly grow, and how white lies can build up to become large consequences that are hard to solve.