Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Jan 5, 2008, at 10:28 AM, Charles Brown wrote:
>
> > A major component of structural racism is residential segregation.
>
> Yup, all of what you say is true. But there's also work like that of
> Chris Tilly and Devah Pager, sending around job applicants. White
> ones get callbacks, black ones don't.
Your point is almost tautologically true -- but also politically irrelevant, because those attitudes of individuals are never going to change until the structure changes. We didn't change attitudes in the '60s to begin with -- we made a forced change in certain structures (e.g., in Bloomington in the annual Christmas Parade), and after awhile those changes begin to produce changes in attitude. I still suspect that the main impact on white attitudes came from the urgan riots: millions of people whose racism was grounded primarily in contempt said in effect, gee, those people are serious! That did far more than MLK-style preaching.
Attitudes are all-important -- but we can't affect attitudes directly; we can't even understand those attitudes directly. Ten million people may share the same _general_ attitude (blacks are lazy; blacks are cowardly; blacks are dangerous), but there may be 10 million quite _separate_ individual psychic structures of motive informing that general attitude. So we can never understand that general attitude by focusing on individual motives.
Another way of putting it. You are absolutely right and absolutely irrelevant to political planning.
Carrol