Changing racial habits requires changing social worlds, not individual minds

Evidence

If habits are formed in our social world, then focusing only on what’s happening inside our heads won’t do the job. Only by changing the world we live in will we change the choices it prompts us to make. If we want to change our racial habits, we have to transform bad schools where the majority of black children learn; stop housing a disproportionate number of black people in prisons, jails, or halfway houses; and remake the places where we live that keep us ignorant of each other. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 170

Habits are not fixed forever. If we are aware of their presence in our lives, we can change them. But we can’t just look inside ourselves and solve the problem. … If habits are formed in our social world, then focusing only on what’s happening inside our heads won’t do the job. Only by changing the world we live in will we change the choices it prompts us to make. If we want to change our racial habits, we have to transform bad schools where the majority of black children learn; stop housing a disproportionate number of black people in prisons, jails, or halfway houses; and remake the places where we live that keep us ignorant of each other. We can’t do it all at once. But our efforts might lead us to examine the practices and beliefs that give the value gap life. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 169

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to John Dewey’s pragmatism which Glaude draws on throughout — habits as social and institutional, not merely attitudinal; also echoes Du Bois’s ‘twoness.’ — connects to: Racial identity forms in settings and social exchanges, not just within individuals.
• DEFINE: Supplies the mechanism reading of what racial habits are: world-shaped dispositions that only world-level change can alter.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 170; Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 169