Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> BklynMagus wrote:
>
> >
> > 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).
A minority of a population becomes active, and by their actions (even before _official_ change of law or institution) they change reality. Example: The black riots of the '60s. The world in which those riots occurred was a different world, institutionally, from the world in which they didn't occur. That changed the attitudes of millions of individuals. As far as I can tell there has _never_ been a really major change that did not follow this pattern.
Carrol