>
> But unless individual attitudes are changed you are never
> going to change institutional behavior. The only way
> queers have made any progress is to get non-queers to
> abandon their hates and fears about us.
This is the quintessential American fallacy: individual attitude change leads to institutional change. In fact, the social psychology research on attitude change demonstrates that it is just the opposite: institutional change shifts social conditions, and then people change their attitudes to adapt to the new social conditions (this is an example of cognitive dissonance theory). --Example: desegregation of public schools. In the mid-50s in the South, virtually all whites opposed school desegregation. Today, almost all Southern whites think integrated schools are just fine. Note that the attitude change here was a result--not a cause--of the enforced desegregation of schools in the South.
I know that it is counterintuitive in our hyperindividualist society, but changing individual attitudes is not an effective technique for reducing racism or inequality. As Carrol noted, racism is not an individual, psychological tendency; rather, racism is a social product woven into all the institutions in our society. If we could eliminate all of the racist attitudes in our society, institutional racism would persist, because there is more to racism than individual attitudes.
Miles