>^^^^
>CB: The key social change being the social group of nine justices ?
>
>^^^^
no, because those 9 justices made their decision based on the long-term
strategy implemented by the NAACP. They steadily eroded the basis upon
which Jim Crow operated, and they did so in a very concerted way, targeting
certain cases that would bring rulings that could then be parlayed into
more cases and subsequent rulings.
julio seems to be asking: so where did the NAACP and other organizations that fought similar struggles get the idea to protest their conditions.
if so, the answer is obvious: because there never was _not_ a tradition of protest among slaves, and before they became slaves via colonial slave trade, they had institutions and practices of social protest, justice, and so forth in their societies.
i'd also add something that people are leaving out in the discussion of institutions. in the social sciences, at least some parts of the social sciences, institutions are things like the family, law, medicine, schooling, etc. and they operate formally, via formal laws, but also informally.
so, the institution of the family can be defined in a lot of ways. The culture wars has defined the terms of the debate - delimiting it, actually, in a remarkably constrained way because one thing not terribly many USers are about it is this:
whether you went to a straight or gay wedding, if you were to learn that one of the parties married for money, most people would find that abhorrent, or at least laughable or sad. they would declare it "not a real marriage".
similarly, if you learned parents put their kids out to work as soon as possible and expected the kids to support to the family coffers while another parent stayed home, a lot of folks would be appalled. (sure, their exceptions but we could predict that in their private moments, most people would judge the parents "bad parents".
that's how institutions work in an informal way. the rules about how to behave are tacit, unspoken -- but they are *very* powerful, so powerful that we have visceral reactions, often, to people who violate those rules: disgust, pity, horror, desires to exact violence or punishment. and we have practices of punishment for those who violate the norms: shunning is used.
During Freedom Summer (see Doug McAdam's book about this), white kids from liberal families who judged the south's treatment of blacks wrong joined FS with an eye toward exacting their understanding of correct normative behavior in informal and formally legally institutions in civil society and the polity.
They were radicalized by a change in the institutional infrastructure created by FS and that was working and living side by side with blacks. When black leadership in SNCC demonstrated for white women how black women were treated differently in the movement, that wasn't just an idea, it was an observation about a different set of normative practices around gender roles. all was not peachy keen, of course. Similarly, living and working together was pushing people into a new set of practices to support an alternative institution. It wasn't just ideas they'd heard about blacks being humans too and should be treated the same. Nothing so abstract as that radicalized them. What radicalized them was being forced to test their racially tolerant liberalism to discover they were not saints themselves. What also radicalized them was observing exactly how awful Jim Crow was. What also radicalized them was things like learning that they shouldn't hold hands with a black person or it might excite a white southerner enough to want to kill them for violating that norm of Jim Crow society.
Like Miles, andie, carrol, I'm not dismissing ideas as a force for change. Ideas are important for those in struggle, probably more important. Ideas and the exchange of those ideas help us understand why we fight, why we sacrifice, why we struggle. They sustain us through dark times. They give us reason and purpose -- or rather remind us.
And for those who, perhaps not born in liberal northern families, but having experienced what, in the critical race theory movement call, hmmm. forgot the word. basically, they're talking about associated experiences. something materially experienced in your own life -- like growing up poor, white or living in a deindustrialized northern town with lots of unemployment -- that act as experience that help someone to empathize, experiences and empathy that make them open to radical ideas, perhaps make them gravitate toward those ideas or explanations.
that's why they're important, then: for that category of people who's materially shaped experiences help them see that something's wrong and encourages them to seek answers.
In my own case, i could have found the answer in libertarianism. but there was a strong history of social change before me -- the 60s and 70s -- that gave me a tradition of social protest that seemed a viable answer or at least a place to start. But it wasn't just the ideas, it was actually existing people still trying very hard to maintain the social protest institutions and practices that had emerged out of the 60s and 60s. those material, embodied institutions and practices -- that it was still (relatively) thriving was enough to lure me away from the siren call of libertarianism as an answer. I mean, shit, i would have gotten laid more with the libertarians. :)
probably shouldn't have got into this because i don't have time, but ... well wouldn't be the first time i jumped in on a convo and then lamed out on it. :)
speaking of which, where is Cat?
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)