Battle between "Historical Self" and "Self Self"

"And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant." In Claudia Rankine's Citizen, this quote comes from a passage about the friendship of a white person and a black person and how the friendship hinges on the combination of their personal relationship and their historical relationship. I think Rankine is saying is that no matter how good your personal friendship is, it can be torn apart in an instant by the historical one. I take this as she is saying that race plays a bigger role than personal relation. This is a problem then. Society needs to find a way to make the personal relations stronger than historical ones so that when issues come up, the historical self does not come out and, instead, the personal one, the one that the relationship should be built around, comes out. I picked this passage from Citizen really just because it just stood out to me. I think Rankine does a great job of using situations in chapter one to convey different racial issues in society today.